
The Gansevoort Peninsula from the south. A pier is in the foreground but you can see the landfill that makes up the base of the Bloomfield Street Sanitation Depot. A proposal is in the works to turn the peninsula where the trucks are parked into a sandy beach. The screened area in the background is part of the golf driving range at the Chelsea Piers.
'Thirteenth Avenue' is a street in the
New York City borough of
Manhattan,
USA, built on landfill in 1837 along the
Hudson River, though only a block of it still remains.
On an 1891
Bromley map, it is shown heading north from
11th Street to around
29th Street, where it became
12th Avenue.
In the early 20th century, New York was looking to build longer piers along the Hudson to accommodate bigger ships such as the
RMS Lusitania and the
RMS Titanic. However, the
United States Navy, which controlled the waterfront, 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
High Line railroad and the
23rd Street ferry station were already in place to support Manhattan's ships.
New York then took the unusual step of removing the block of landfill south of
22nd Street so the
Chelsea Piers could be constructed to handle the luxury liners.
A small section north of
Gansevoort Street, the West Washington Market, was left as an exception and this became a peninsula ('Gansevoort Peninsula'). The only remaining block of 13th Avenue, behind the Bloomfield Street Sanitation Depot across the
West Side Highway from Gansevoort Street, is currently used as a parking lot for garbage trucks and
New York City Department of Sanitation employees' vehicles; this remnant of the avenue bears no signage identifying it as 13th Avenue.