This is part of our weekly series, Lost Masterpieces, about the greatest works of architecture and art that were destroyed or never completed.
Traipsing along the Hudson River on Manhattan’s West Side today, enjoying green spaces, stunning vistas, and happy people, it’s easy to forget that this area recently was a dump—symbolizing urban decay and governmental dysfunction.
After ships became too big to dock there, the rotting piers became wild urban hubs in the 1970s. A city of grime and crime supplanted the thrifty, hardworking, earnest metropolis of the 1940s and 1950s.