13th Avenue (Manhattan)

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. [ [http://thirteenthavenue.blogspot.com/2006/06/thirteenth-avenue.html History of Thirteenth Avenue.] ]

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 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 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 [The official address is 2 Bloomfield Street, Bloomfield Street being the single block of dockside access to the 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. A proposal is in the works to turn the peninsula into a sandy beach.

References

Streets of Manhattan
West = West Side Highway
East = Essex Street/Rutgers Street