Cruising on the West Side Piers, New York’s wild side

At the dawn of the 20^th century, New York’s fabled West Side Piers signalled the arrival of a new era of global travel and adventure as luxury liners crossed the Atlantic Ocean, making headlines all their own. But with the arrival of jet planes, the cruise industry was forced to reinvent itself, becoming a pallid shell of its once glamorous. The piers were quickly abandoned and left to rot, crumbling into the Hudson River as a symbol of ​“benign neglect”.

But New Yorkers, like nature, abhor a vacuum. In the wake of Gay Liberation, the piers had become downtown Manhattan’s most illustrious cruising grounds, beckoning a new generation of queer youth in the halcyon days before AIDS. The outlaw environment quickly drew artists like Peter Hujar, David Wojnarowicz, Leonard Fink, Stanley Stellar, and Alvin Baltrop, who found beauty amidst the squalid decadence of industrial collapse.

With the arrival of AIDS, the piers had evolved into a community pushed to the very edge of the earth as the relentless onslaught of gentrification began to transform the last vestiges of downtown’s queer underground into a bourgeois playground. ​“The piers was a refuge for people like us, who were LGBTQ+. It was a sanctuary where people could go be their authentic selves,” says photographer William Howell, who has just published a collection of scenes from the era in West Side Highway (Dark Entries Editions). 

• Read next: Inside New York’s underground ​’60s & ​’70s cruising scene

After moving to the West Village in 1993, Howell found himself irresistibly drawn to life on the piers and began chronicling scenes of everyday life through the lens of an insider looking out. ​“That area was always a walk on the wild side,” he says. ​“You crossed the West Side Highway on to the piers, and you were going to have a story. The city put up signs saying you would be fined if you went on the piers, but that didn’t stop anyone, certainly not me.” 

Where other artists were drawn to the illicit thrill of cruising, Howell embraced the prosaic pleasures of life at tar beach, be it sunbathing, moon gazing, skinny dipping, or just hanging out with friends. Here, in his photographs, you feel a sense of escape from it all, with nary a payphone or pager making its presence known. Instead there are jock straps, g‑strings, construction boots, fanny packs, NYPD caps, rollerblades, stilettos, and enough sizzling flesh to rival the nearby Meatpacking District when blood still ran through its cobblestone streets.

At the piers, Howell became friends with a trans woman named Alberta who knew everyone on the scene, and gave him instant credibility. He remembers, ​“When I started taking photos and somebody would say, ​‘Don’t take my photo,’ Alberta would say, ​‘Oh, don’t mind him. He’s just taking photos. It’s nothing. It’s his kink,’ and they just let it alone.” Free to photograph as he wished, Howell naturally gravitated to creating a family photo album of the community on its own terms. 

• Read next: The raw, fledgling intimacy of Peter Hujar’s contact sheets

For many, the piers became a home away from home, free from the violence and scorn of a culture often dominated by fundamentalist Christian ideals. While televangelist Jerry Falwell infamously decreed that ​“AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals; it is God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals” in 1983, the community was left to fend for itself. A decade later, the war waged on.

“We were still a year away from the [AIDS] cocktail of antiretroviral drugs that helped people live longer, so there were people who were sick, but they were still living and surviving,” Howell says. ​“I wanted to keep the photos as joyous as possible, because I wanted to show that despite everything going on, people were gay, out, and happy. It’s beautiful to have that kind of freedom.”

West Side Highway by William Howell is published by Dark Entries Editions.

Miss Rosen is a freelance arts and photography writer, follow her on X.

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