Thirteenth Avenue was a street in the

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

borough A borough is an administrative division in various English-speaking countries. In principle, the term ''borough'' designates a self-governing walled town, although in practice, official use of the term varies widely. History In the Middle Ag ...

Manhattan Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...

. It was built in 1837 along the

Hudson River The Hudson River is a river that flows from north to south primarily through eastern New York. It originates in the Adirondack Mountains of Upstate New York and flows southward through the Hudson Valley to the New York Harbor between Ne ...

. The avenue was later removed in the early 20th century to make way for the

Chelsea Piers Chelsea Piers is a series of piers in Chelsea, on the West Side of Manhattan in New York City. Located to the west of the West Side Highway ( Eleventh Avenue) and Hudson River Park and to the east of the Hudson River, they were originally a ...

History

Thirteenth Avenue was built in 1837 on

landfill A landfill site, also known as a tip, dump, rubbish dump, garbage dump, or dumping ground, is a site for the disposal of waste materials. Landfill is the oldest and most common form of waste disposal, although the systematic burial of the wast ...

along the Hudson River, becoming the westernmost avenue in downtown and lower-midtown Manhattan. An 1891 map published by G. W. Bromley shows Thirteenth Avenue heading north from 11th Street to around 29th Street, where it merged into 12th Avenue. Sanborn Manhattan V

In the early 20th century, New York wanted to build longer piers along the Hudson to accommodate bigger ships such as the RMS ''Lusitania'' and the RMS ''Titanic''. However, the United States government, which controls the bulkhead line, refused to allow longer piers to be built. The shipping companies were reluctant to build longer piers further uptown because existing infrastructure such as the tracks of the

New York Central Railroad The New York Central Railroad was a railroad primarily operating in the Great Lakes and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. The railroad primarily connected greater New York and Boston in the east with Chicago and St. Louis in the Mi ...

and the 23rd Street ferry station were already in place downtown. To solve this problem, the city took the unusual step of removing the section of landfill on which Thirteenth Avenue ran south of 22nd Street so the

could be constructed to handle the liners. A small section of the landfill north of

Gansevoort Street Gansevoort may refer to any one of the following: __NOTOC__ People *Guert Gansevoort (1812–1868), US Navy officer * Harmen Harmense Gansevoort (ca. 1634–1709), early American settler, landowner and beer brewer * Leonard Gansevoort (1751–1810) ...

, the West Washington Market, was left as an exception, becoming what was known as the "Gansevoort Peninsula", later the location of a salt-storage facility of the New York City Department of Sanitation, across

West Street The Joe DiMaggio Highway, commonly called the West Side Highway and formerly the Miller Highway, is a mostly surface section of New York State Route 9A (NY 9A), running from West 72nd Street along the Hudson River to the southern t ...

from

. The small space between Gansevoort Street and Bloomfield Street, and the approximate place where Thirteenth Avenue once ran, was used as a parking lot for garbage trucks and employees' vehicles. An adjacent stretch of cobblestone is all that remains of the original Thirteenth Avenue, which has apparently been de-mapped by the city. It does not appear on the official

Geographic Information System A geographic information system (GIS) is a type of database containing geographic data (that is, descriptions of phenomena for which location is relevant), combined with software tools for managing, analyzing, and visualizing those data. In a ...

map, but does appear on

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. Proposals have been made for a sandy beach, or for a garbage transfer pier.

Conversion of Gansevoort Peninsula into a park

In 2016, the city began demolishing the Department of Sanitation building as part of a plan for the creation of a new public park on the land. In January 2019, it was announced that the park – which will be developed by the

Hudson River Park Trust Hudson River Park is a waterfront park on the North River (Hudson River) that extends from 59th Street south to Battery Park in the New York City borough of Manhattan. The park, a component of the Manhattan Waterfront Greenway, stretches and ...

– will be designed by

James Corner Field Operations James Corner (born 1961) is a landscape architecture, landscape architect and theorist whose works exhibit a focus on "developing innovative approaches toward landscape architectural design and urbanism." His designs of note include Fresh Kills Park ...

, which designed the High Line elevated park in Manhattan and

Domino Park Domino Park is a public park in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York City. It spans a quarter mile along the East River near the Williamsburg Bridge, at the Domino Sugar Refinery site. Along the five-block riverside walk, variou ...

in Brooklyn. The space will include a public art project to be commissioned by the Whitney Museum, and Manhattan's first public beach. The construction of the park is expected to cost $900 million and take two years, with completion expected in 2022. The construction will be funded by New York state, New York City, and private interests, as well as $152 million secured by the Trust through the sale of air rights. When finished, the park will be the largest single greenspace in the long, , Hudson River Park.Attanasio, Cedar and Italiano, Laura (January 31, 2019
"Manhattan is getting its own beach"
''

New York Post The ''New York Post'' (''NY Post'') is a conservative daily tabloid newspaper published in New York City. The ''Post'' also operates NYPost.com, the celebrity gossip site PageSix.com, and the entertainment site Decider.com. It was established ...

Gallery

File:Former 13th Av from north jeh.jpg, 13th Avenue as seen from the north in 2008, with World Financial Center in background File:Gansevoort Penn cleared 2018-08 jeh.jpg, Gansevoort Peninsula cleared (2018)

References

{{Streets of Manhattan, state=collapsed *13 Chelsea, Manhattan Meatpacking District, Manhattan West Village Hudson River Park