When Matt Hural came for a visit to New York in September,
Jeff Williams and I knew we had to do something special.
We all met in Italy a few years before,
and we had adventured together from the deserts of Tunisia,
Where could we go in New York with Matt?
Jeff Williams had an idea.
It was somewhere he had always wanted to go, too.
So we piled into the boat at dawn,
and headed up the Hudson River.
You may have seen this from the Hudson River Drive,
just around West 63rd street,
a huge old pier crumpled up in the river.
This was the old New York Pier D,
built of wood in the 1880’s,
rebuilt in steel after a fire in 1922,
and then finally abandoned in 1971.
Apparently its sloped floor had something to do with loading ships from trains,
although it was probably never this sloped.
I found out a few months later that the pier was removed by the city parks department.
Here is the New York Times article about it’s demolition.
We might have been some of Pier D’s last visitors.
Jeff had been referring to it as the Gordan Matta-Clark pier, and we absorbed our surroundings as if we were viewing a huge sculpture.
The sun was getting higher,
as we headed back to shore.
Matt took a little chunk of pier D with him in his knee,
and Jeff took a little hook as a souvenir.
We didn’t realize as we floated away,
that this was the last time any of us would see this New York landmark.
We wanted to make one more stop before breakfast.
The 69th Street Transfer Bridge.
It is on the National Register of Historic Places,
so it probably won’t be demolished any time soon.
But you might want to pay a visit anyway,
you never know how long these things will last.
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