I walk along Hudson River Park with my dogs so often that it has become one of those parts of Tribeca I almost forget to think about.
You head toward the river. You pass the tennis courts and the dog run. Kids are playing mini golf on Pier 25. Someone is launching a kayak from Pier 26. Runners move along the esplanade, people settle into chairs facing the water, and on a clear evening everyone seems to stop for a few minutes when the sun starts dropping behind New Jersey.
It feels completely natural. But not very long ago, almost none of this was here.
That is difficult to picture now. And once I started looking at old photographs of the Tribeca waterfront, I became fascinated by the question: what exactly were we walking beside before Hudson River Park?
The answer is that this edge of the neighborhood has lived several very different lives.
Long before there was a park, this was a working waterfront.
By the nineteenth century, New York's Hudson River shoreline was becoming an essential part of the city's commercial life. The completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 helped turn New York Harbor into one of the world's great centers of trade, and the West Side waterfront grew alongside it.
Tribeca was especially connected to that economy.
Washington Market became New York's great food market, while the surrounding neighborhood filled with warehouses, manufacturers and businesses that depended on easy access to ships and freight. Produce, food and other goods moved through this part of Manhattan constantly.
Even the shoreline itself was different.
For centuries, Manhattan expanded westward through landfill. According to historical materials from Hudson River Park, much of the land occupied by today's park was once underwater. The earlier natural shoreline in this area ran considerably farther east, around what are now Greenwich and Washington Streets in portions of lower Manhattan.
Eventually, the city formalized its western edge with a massive granite bulkhead stretching north from the Battery. Piers projected from that new shoreline into the Hudson, creating the infrastructure for a waterfront built around commerce rather than recreation.
For generations, that meant the river was something Tribeca worked beside. Ships came and went. Warehouses faced the waterfront. Freight moved through the neighborhood. West Street became an increasingly important transportation corridor.
The arrival of the elevated West Side Highway in the twentieth century added another layer between the neighborhood and the river. Instead of today's landscaped esplanade, the western edge of Manhattan became defined by transportation and industrial infrastructure.
Then that world began to disappear.
Shipping changed. Maritime activity moved elsewhere. Trucks replaced many of the systems that had once depended on the piers. Structures deteriorated, and sections of Manhattan's West Side waterfront gradually became obsolete.
The old elevated West Side Highway became part of that decline. In 1973, a section collapsed near Gansevoort Street, dramatically underscoring how badly the infrastructure had deteriorated.
What followed was one of the great planning battles in modern New York.
A proposal known as Westway envisioned replacing the highway with an underground interstate while creating new land above it and extending Manhattan farther into the Hudson. The project became the subject of years of political, financial and environmental fights before ultimately collapsing in the 1980s.
And that left New York with a very large question. What should happen to the waterfront instead?
This is where the photographs become almost unbelievable.
Photojournalist Carl Glassman, who moved to Tribeca in 1979, has documented the waterfront for decades. His images of Piers 25 and 26 in the early 1980s show a place almost unrecognizable from today.
Pier 26 spent years as a parking lot. Old structures sat on Pier 25. Other portions of the waterfront were deteriorated or abandoned.
But something interesting happened before anyone built the park. Tribecans began using the waterfront anyway.
In the 1980s, residents Cathy Drew and Jim Wetteroth took over abandoned spaces around Pier 26 for community uses. Wetteroth helped establish the Downtown Boathouse, while Drew created the River Project, turning part of the neglected waterfront into a place for river research and education.
It is a pattern that comes up again and again when you look into Tribeca's history: residents see an overlooked piece of the neighborhood and begin imagining what else it could become.
Over time, that idea became much bigger.
In 1998, New York State passed the Hudson River Park Act, formally creating Hudson River Park and the Hudson River Park Trust. The plan would transform miles of deteriorating industrial waterfront from Tribeca northward into public open space.
The transformation happened slowly, section by section and pier by pier.
For Tribeca, the major rebuilding came later. Funding secured in the mid-2000s allowed the reconstruction of Piers 25 and 26 and the surrounding upland areas to move forward.
Today's Pier 25 bears almost no resemblance to its predecessor.
At 985 feet, it is the longest pier in Hudson River Park. It now holds the playground, miniature golf, volleyball courts, turf, boating facilities and historic vessels that have become part of everyday neighborhood life.
Pier 26 tells an even more interesting story.
The pier opened in its current form in 2020 with an ecological design intended, in part, to evoke the Hudson River shoreline before centuries of development changed it. Its native plantings represent different ecological zones, and the Tide Deck at the western end brings visitors closer to the estuary itself.
There is something wonderfully circular about that.
A waterfront that began as a natural shoreline became one of the busiest working edges of the city. It was filled, bulkheaded, industrialized, covered with piers, separated from the neighborhood by transportation infrastructure, partially abandoned and finally transformed into public space.
And now, on Pier 26, part of the design is trying to help us understand what the shoreline might have felt like before almost any of that happened.
I think about this differently now when I walk my dogs along the river.
The park feels so established that it is easy to assume Tribeca simply came with a waterfront. But the waterfront we know is actually one of the neighborhood's newest chapters.
There are people living here today who remember looking west and seeing rotting piers instead of playgrounds. There are photographs of Pier 26 as a parking lot. And there was a moment, not so long ago in New York terms, when nobody knew exactly what this stretch of the Hudson would become.
Today, it is difficult to imagine Tribeca without it. Maybe that is the most remarkable part.
The river was always here. Our relationship with it wasn't.
