Gansevoort Plaza & The Meatpacking Cobblestones

Why is it significant?

Stand right here on the Belgian cobblestones of Gansevoort Plaza and look up at the heavy steel underbelly of the elevated viaduct crossing overhead. You are at the southern threshold of the High Line in Manhattan's historic Meatpacking District.

Key Facts

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Stand right here on the Belgian cobblestones of Gansevoort Plaza and look up at the heavy steel underbelly of the elevated viaduct crossing overhead. You are at the southern threshold of the High Line in Manhattan's historic Meatpacking District. In the nineteen hundreds, over two hundred wholesale slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants operated on these streets, their butchers packing beef, pork, and poultry in sawdust-strewn stalls cooled by ammonia pipes. Why was this elevated steel viaduct built in the first place? In the nineteenth century, freight trains ran directly down the middle of Tenth Avenue at street level, causing so many horrific collisions with horse carriages and pedestrians that Tenth Avenue became known across America as Death Avenue. To protect citizens, the railway hired the West Side Cowboys: men on horseback who rode ahead of trains waving red warning flags. Finally, in nineteen thirty-four, the city and railroad completed the West Side Elevated Line, elevating freight thirty feet into the air so trains could roll straight into factory warehouses without touching street pavement. Look to your left at the striking asymmetrical steel-and-glass facade of the Whitney Museum of American Art, designed by Renzo Piano and opened in twenty fifteen. When container shipping and highway trucking made urban rail obsolete, the last train carrying frozen turkeys rumbled down these tracks in nineteen eighty. The viaduct sat abandoned, slowly taken over by windblown dandelion seeds, until two visionary neighborhood residents fought to turn it into the world's most famous elevated park.