Title: West Street
Subtitle: West Street, Cortlandt and Dey streets, 1880s
Text: West Street was created in the early nineteenth century when landfill extended the Lower Manhattan shoreline. The original port had developed on the shallow East River, but as ships increased in size, the major piers moved to the deeper Hudson, and by the 1860s, the South Street waterfront had begun to lose traffic to the docks of the Lower West Side.
Here, in the 1880s, West Street is crisscrossed by horses hauling flimsy wagons piled with boxes and bags, while other wagons crowd the piers waiting to load and unload freight. Before automobiles competed for space on the street, unsavory West Street was almost entirely used by commercial vehicles. The ramshackle buildings that line the city side of West Street house shops, bars, and seedy hotels catering to the desires of the thousands of sailors.
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