Opened in stages starting August 1995, the 28-acre Chelsea Piers complex transformed four long-neglected Hudson River piers into a private sports and recreation village with no home team.
There's no subway station at the complex itself — the nearest stop is a roughly 13-minute walk away, so most visitors rely on the M23 crosstown bus or a car.
The piers were built for ships. Warren and Wetmore, the firm behind Grand Central Terminal, designed a row of terminal buildings with pink granite facades that opened around 1910 to take the largest transatlantic liners. Titanic was booked into Pier 59 and never arrived; the Carpathia delivered her lifeboats there before landing the survivors at Cunard's berth just downriver, from which the Lusitania sailed on her last crossing in 1915. By the 1930s the newest liners had outgrown the berths, the sheds went over to cargo, and the row spent half a century in decline.
The rescue came sideways. After the Westway highway plan collapsed, the waterfront was open to other uses, and a group of investors led by Roland Betts took a lease on Piers 59 through 62. Betts had come to the idea through Sky Rink, Manhattan's year-round indoor ice rink, then stranded on an upper floor of a building on West 33rd Street and short of ice time. Construction began in 1994 and the 28-acre complex opened in stages from August 1995.
The layout still follows the sheds. Pier 59 carries the tiered driving range, where balls are struck out over the water into a netted field. Pier 61 holds two sheets of ice in a column-free hall long enough to run them end to end. The field house — courts, batting cages, gymnastics pits, climbing walls — and a bowling alley, a fitness club, event rooms and a marina occupy the remaining piers and the head house that ties them together, and film and photography studios have worked the upper floors since it opened.
There is no home team and nothing to watch. This is a working recreation plant, privately run on a lease inside the public Hudson River Park, with the greenway along its front and the park's own skate park on Pier 62 at the northern end. The West Side Highway still separates it from the neighborhood it is named for: from the street it reads as a wall, from the water as a row of ships' berths that never lost their shape.
West Side Highway, New York, NY 10011 · Official site ↗
Chelsea Piers is a series of piers in Chelsea, on the West Side of Manhattan in New York City. Located to the west of the West Side Highway and Hudson River Park and to the east of the Hudson River, they were originally a passenger ship terminal in the early 1900s that was used by RMS Lusitania and was the destination of RMS Carpathia after rescuing the survivors of RMS Titanic. The piers replaced a variety of run-down waterfront structures with a row of grand buildings embellished with pink granite facades.
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