Established by the Hudson River Park Act of September 1998 after the Westway highway plan collapsed, the 4.5-mile park strings together rebuilt Manhattan West Side piers that once handled shipping, from 59th Street down to Battery Park.
The park's Greenway is the busiest bike path in the country, so pedestrians and cyclists frequently collide on summer weekends between Little Island and Battery Park — weekday mornings or evenings are far less congested.
The park exists because a highway did not. Westway would have buried a new interstate in landfill along the Manhattan shore; it collapsed on September 19, 1985, undone in part by litigation over the striped bass that overwinter in the rotting interpier spaces, and the federal money was traded for transit. Thirteen years later the Hudson River Park Act, signed in September 1998, put the shoreline under a joint state-city trust and required the park to earn much of its own operating budget from its own real estate. That is why Pier 40, Holland America Line's terminal since 1962, still carries parking and playing fields rather than lawn.
Read the piers by number and you get a shipping directory. Pier 54 was Cunard's: the Carpathia landed the Titanic's survivors there in 1912, and the Lusitania sailed from it in 1915. Pier 57 was the Grace Line cargo terminal, then a city bus depot from 1969 to 2003, then a holding pen for arrests during the 2004 Republican convention. Piers 59 through 62, now Chelsea Piers, were the White Star Line passenger terminals of the early 1900s, and the Titanic was booked to dock at 59. Pier 86 holds the Intrepid. Pier 97 handled the Swedish American Line and reopened as parkland in 2024.
About 400 acres of the river itself lies inside the park boundary as a designated estuarine sanctuary, which is why derelict pile fields were left standing rather than pulled: they are habitat. Little Island, on the Pier 55 footprint, sets 132 concrete tulips over that water — Heatherwick Studio's forms, Signe Nielsen's planting — and opened May 21, 2021. At Gansevoort Peninsula, opened October 2, 2023, David Hammons's Day's End traces in steel the outline of the Pier 52 shed that Gordon Matta-Clark cut open in 1975.
On foot, stay on the inland esplanade and turn out onto the piers deliberately. The piers, not the path, are where the park actually is.
New York, NY 10014 · Official site ↗
Hudson River Park is a waterfront park and marine reserve along the Hudson River on the west side of Manhattan in New York City. The 4.5-mile (7.2 km) linear park extends from 59th Street south to Battery Park and comprises part of the Hudson River Greenway. After Central Park, it is the second-largest park in Manhattan at 550 acres (220 ha), including 400 acres (160 ha) of the river itself protected as the Estuarine Sanctuary.
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