The Meat Packing District (MePa) is today one of the hippest neighborhoods of Manhattan and the Highline is now attracting crowds from all around the world.
In the mid-nineties, this area (most New yorkers called "The Meat Market") was dark and desolate with the semi-abandoned warehouses of meat purveyors. In the early morning, the butchers going to work were crossing night creatures finishing their shifts. There were a few clubs, hidden on the meat market's dark corners. Jackie 60 and of course the infamous Vault, The Manhole and Hellfire clubs in the (then iconic) Triangle Building. After going to the clubs like Nell's on 14th street, Florent on Gansevoort was a real treat. A fun coffee shop with crazy drag waitresses and other strangers of the night. And also great burgers and breakfast for hungry nightclubbers crashing in the morning light.
Here are some day time shots of this area with its great cinematic quality.
Cameras: Nikon FM2 and F3HP - Nikor 35mm/f2 - 50mm/f1.4 / Canon AF35
Please also see: "The Last days of 42nd street"
Please also see:
Gorgeous.
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for these fantastic photos. It really brings back a flood of memories.
ReplyDeleteThank you for this nice comment ! The kind that makes me want to keep going with this blog !
ReplyDeleteHappy New Year !
GA
These photos are terrific. Man, I really miss those days. Thanks so much for posting these.
ReplyDeleteI remember walking these streets as a six-year-old with my dad every Sunday & I can't believe that my kids will see a COMPLETELY different side of New York that I experienced. Thank you so much for bringing these memories back. Pictures really are worth a thousand words. In this case, millions!
ReplyDeleteThanks...a million for your nice comment ! I am delighted to know these images are being apreciated by New Yorkers.
DeleteAre you a cinematographer? Nice eye. Compose in B&W and you can do anything. I messed a lot of the '90's in the city because I was off playing Navy. I was in some of the same areas in the '80's when I was at the Navy Yard and other parts of town. I miss the grit. As a photographer it is that sort of subject matter that is more interesting than the scrubbed and clean city we are dealing with now.
ReplyDeleteI moved out in the late 80s at age 17, and the very first apartment I had on my own was in the Meatpacking District. It was all I could afford- and so seedy nobody understood how or why I could live there. My old building is long gone now, and I no longer recognize the neighborhood at all.
ReplyDeleteThank you for taking me back to a simpler, wonderful time.
Thank you for these wonderful photos. A lot of West St. memories are there. Unfortunately, you can barely recognize the area now. Bring back the old days of the Anvil, Alex's, Mineshaft,J's, etc and the fun times that were then.
ReplyDeleteThanks Richard ! I am glad these images bring all these memories to my blog readers ! I miss these times too ! I will continue updating my other posts. Please come back for more images of NY in the 90's. GA.
DeleteI too greatly miss the gay clubs in the area. At that time one had to actually talk or have physical contact with a human being. Today, young gays use Grindr and the internet and texting to hook up. Sad.
DeleteGad, I can remember those days, and in my mind, that is still how the district is (haven't been down there in a decade). Thanks for the photos
ReplyDeleteI am a new New Yorker (6yrs) and I am always fascinated by seeng how much the city has changed in a relatively short period of time. I wish had witnessed all these changes. Please keep posting pics of a long gone NYC. I feel nostalgic even if I was not here back then!
ReplyDeleteWow, I can smell the 'hood through these photos. I lived in Chelsea and then the West Village from 1990-2005. What memories.
ReplyDeleteI live down here and I've watched in (almost) horror as the whole area, not just the meat market, was changed into a slicker more commercialized version of the upper eastside. Seeing these terrific pictures of your's makes me sad, knowing what was lost, in spite of it being made a bit less dangerous. Too bad you don't have any shots of The Superior Ink Company.. what a gorgeous building... it should have been saved. Do you have a pictures of Florent?
ReplyDeleteThanks to all of you for all of these kind messages ! Unfortunately, I do not have images of The Superior Ink Company. There are so many pictures I regret I didn't not shoot...but at the time I had no idea of how much the city will change. I used to go out a lot to clubs and hang out a little bit everywhere at night in Manhattan and that's a big part of NY experience in the 90's that I also neglected to photograph at the time...
DeleteRegarding Florent, one of my favorite places at the time, I only found in my old negatives and slides a very mediocre shot of the front that I decided not to post...It could have been added to my post about the "lost diners"....
I agree with Anonymous just above me. Love the photos, totally depressed that during the 30 years I've lived here the neighborhood's been destroyed with only the facades left.
ReplyDeleteAs a local, I went to Florent for breakfast occasionally, or lunch. Completely different feel from the mid-night/early morning Florent, which was smoky (when smoking was still allowed in restaurants). I live a block away from Gansvoort and rarely bother even going down the block there any more. Nothing worth seeing/doing for anyone but tourists.
Thank you for these photos. I grew up here just below Gansevort for a few years as a kid just before it turned to hell with new construction and the new generation.
ReplyDeleteAwesome - thank you so much for posting these. I tell people all the time about going to clubs like the Cooler (for music) in the 90s and being scared out of my mind walking there. No one can believe me any more :)
ReplyDeleteThank you. I've worked and lived in the Meat Packing District since 1990. I have a 2 year old now growing up here
ReplyDeleteand I'm so glad to see you capturing what is was like. So easy to forget what was here or there....
Wonderful photographs here. Thank you, Mr. Alessandrini. To look again at the Rio Mar restaurant made me hungry, and also made me wonder how an area could go from so vibrant to so vapid in what now seems like the blink of an eye.
ReplyDeleteThank you Baby Dave !!! Oh yeah ! The Paella from Rio Mar was the best ! I remember going there often with my good friend Stella, the owner of cafe de la Pace on 7th street.
DeleteWe used to go there all the time in the 90's for Rio Mar and Florent, and I never noticed the neighborhood being as seedy as the pics portray it to be. I suppose that's because NYC has been so spit-polished that graffiti and an industrial look seem much more jarring now than they actually were.
ReplyDeleteThese photos are fantastic. I miss this New York.
ReplyDeletethank-you...great pictures of a not so great but intriguing area of nyc.. very well done..
ReplyDeleteAmazing photos !
ReplyDeletewish I could relive the 90's, forever
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for these wonderful pictures. A real treat. I used to go there a lot 1990-until the the very late 90s. Of course I still go there occasionally. But since Pastis joined the sublime desolation in1999 (and apparently closing March 2014) that whole area started to dramatically change. Like many of us I am not happy about the transformation of this enclave of our beloved NYC.
ReplyDeleteYou know, by 1990 already, it felt like "the end of days" over there. I'm referring to days of Gay liberation, this area being the focal point of "extreme" gay lifstyles and all the stretch which started on Christopher and West Streets, with "Badlands" bar at the corner, "The Ramrod" next to it before W10th, "Keller's" one block south.
As one went up West Street, Industrial facades to the right, lots of two story garages/car repair shops, more warehouses, the unexpected Gym, Massive old buildings such as The Westbeth (Still frozen in history in 2014), The Hudson to one's left, the abandoned Elevated Highway's shadow obstructed the River view, the warehouses falling apart right over the river, and the Piers, most of the ones beween Chrsitopher all the way up to the Gansevoort and the trucks under the elevated highway...then one reached the old meatpacking district...by the early 90's of course this whole world disappeared but the remnants were still there. The meatpacking district looked sad by day, but it still looked beautifully eerie and almost romantic from dusk til dawn.
It looked like in the "Good Old Days". Just like Isao Tomita's "Footprints in the Snow". One of the Mineshaft's landmark early morning music. This music defines the essence of the area at night.You know, the Mineshaft at 835 Washington. I went to "Sea" the other day. The restaurant that now occupies the former site of the Mineshaft. If walls could talk...
They Did.
Thanks so much for bringing back such wild and great memories. I used to frequent this area on nights, when the Mineshaft was in full swing. These pictures bring back all the feelings I had at that time. The smell of the meat in the streets, the darkness and quietness of the nights. Being scared to death, yet excited at the same time. Wow.. you brought it all back by posting these pictures of a New York that will only live in memories and pictures. Thanks again.
ReplyDeleteI was a dancer at the Gaiety 1976 - 1978, and found myself "homeless" on nights that my friends could not put me up (dates!) and my bed was in my StonyBrook dorm. The meatmarket was where I could find afterhours clubs that were open 7 days a week to get off the streets and in the company of other drug induced dancers. Once I graduated, I lived in the West Village and would practice my rollerskating moves on the closed elevated West Side Highway, overlooking the sexual proclivities of gay men trolling in the abandoned piers. I wrote about my daze and nites of hoofing in NYC 1976 - 2004: 'Homo GoGo Man' by Christopher Duquette on DonnaInk & Amazon. My graduate thesis (yeah, I graduated from StonyBrook) was on the then controversial West Side Highway Project, which never came to fruition. I miss the old West Side.
ReplyDeletemy uncle live 90s on horatio street, is totally changed.
ReplyDeleteI lived on horatio street in the 80's-90's really loved the city then, so much energy & creativity - and the CLUBS ! just faaaabulous. sigh
ReplyDeleteThese photos are amazing, thank you so much for preserving the memories
I was a local truck driver who worked at Schuster Express, which was located just north of the Meatpacking District, between 16th and 17th Street at Tenth Avenue (where the rental apartment building, the Caledonia is now). I was working in this area in the early 80s, and remember what this area looked like before the tourists and the High Line appeared. I even remember seeing the trains running on the High Line just before the elevated railway went quiet. Ah, the Mineshaft and the Anvil!! Nice memories from that era, never to be experienced again. After Guiliani, then Bloomberg, the youth and newcomers of today will never experience the fun I had back then. Today, it's cleaned up and sanitized to the point that NYC as a whole is becoming just a supersized suburban mall, with suburban attitudes. Happily, these pictures bring back those memories!! Thanks for posting them!
ReplyDeleteI wrote extensively about my 1st hand experience frequenting the underground club scene that populated the once active Meat Market from 1976 – 1980: The Anvil, Alice in Wonderland, Crisco Disco, Mars...in my book Homo GoGo Man: a fairytale about a boy who grew up in discoland, now in a new improved 2nd edition with a more marketable cover after 4 years as a best seller. In the late 80’s, when Ecstasy was the drug of choice, there was an underground circuit called ‘Outlaw Parties’ that, pre-social media, the telephone was the means of announcing the time and place of the next party, thrown in some obscure and vacated space in NYC: the Williamsburg Bridge, a subway station no longer in use, a McDonald’s in Times Square... One night I was privy to an ‘Outlaw Party’ location and starting time where we strangers met under dangerously decrepit but still existing elevated rail road tracks that ran from 23rd Street into the West Village. Everyone expected the railway, as did the elevated West Side Highway, to be demolished. But on that night, we party revelers met a the designated time and spot to climb an existing ladder to the weed covered elevated railway, keeping vigilant about numerous gaping holes and the expectation of law enforcement agents once someone reported spotting our part dancing in the dark to a boom-box. It sorrows me to see a neighborhood that we could feel fearless in now the domain of the super-rich, with stores and restaurants selling merchandise unobtainable to our current financial status. That the elevated railway was celebrated by the historic society to preserve a piece of NYC history, open to the public as “the High-Line” is a nice gesture. But the cookie-cutter construction of architecturally generic high-end high-rise residential structures distracts from the quaint charm of the night I trespassed on the old remains of a time in history in NYC that no longer exists: it was a city dependent on the commerce of the railroad cars carrying cargo and meat markets, with neighborhoods that were affordable to call home to the working and young new pioneers to NYC.
ReplyDeleteAlready read your book some time ago. i purchased it on Amazon and was happy to be able to read it on Kindle. Very entertaining indeed!
DeleteI moved to NYC in 1986, and while all those haunts disappeared by 1985, one could still feel some strong decadent energy in the Meat Market (That's how it was referred to back then). I was obsessed with the actual locations and buildings which housed those dens of iniquity. I'm looking for playlists of music of the mineshaft, there's one online from Jim Rice who prepared mixes for Wally Wallace (RIP). Amazing music
Amazing photos... as if plucked my faint memories of the meatpacking district. And your photograph of 833 Washington Street helped me confirm a filming location for 1988's "Vampire's Kiss," starring Nicolas Cage. Thanks!!
ReplyDeleteThese are unbelievable, but we gotta see these shots BIGGER!
ReplyDeleteThank you ! I'm actually trying to publish a book which would be a great way to get to see a selection of my photographs printed in a larger format.
DeleteThese photos are fantastic. I miss this New York.
ReplyDelete