A history of the Wild West Side and the Whitney’s new public sculpture

Jeff Cowen, Meat Packing District, Silver Gelatin Print, 1988

Long before its abandoned train track was turned into a famous park (The High Line), the streets of New York’s Meatpacking District were lined with racks of raw meat, drug dealers and transexual prostitutes. Biker bars and BDSM sex clubs, run by the mafia, were also scattered throughout the neighborhood. Back then there were no condos or designer stores… and no art museum. However, because it was socially and physically on the outskirts of town, it provided young artists with inspiration for, and a place to create experimental art.

Gordon Matta-Clark, . Day’s End (Pier 52) (Exterior with Ice), 1975. Color photograph, 1029 x 794 mm. © Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark, Artists Rights Society (ARS), N.Y.

Jeff Cowen, Greenwhich Street, 94 x 127 cm, Silver Gelatin Print, 1988

The piers across from where the Whitney Museum now is were once called “the sex piers” because they were such a popular place for gay men to find and have sex. The gay artist Davis Wojnarowicz frequented these piers, took photos and wrote about sex at them. It was also near that museum on Gansevoort Street that in 1973 the West Side Elevated Highway collapsed leaving the street in ruins. Two years after the highway collapsed, the artist Gordon Matta-Clark transformed a pier building at the foot of Gansevoort into an artwork or “indoor park.” Matta-Clark’s now-iconic “park” Day’s End was created when the artist broke into the abandoned building and sliced five openings into the walls and floors. 

Gordon Matta-Clark, Days End Pier 52.3 (Documentation of the action “Day’s End” made in 1975 in New York, United States), 1975, printed 1977. Gelatin silver print.

Thirty-five years after Gordon Matta-Clark created his piece, The Whitney Museum, in collaboration with the Hudson River Park Trust, is developing its own Day’s End. Unlike the artwork that inspired it, this new public sculpture is institutionally approved and will be permanent.  This 2021 rendition, made of stainless steel bars, will be installed in a neighborhood that has changed dramatically since the 1970s. Nonetheless, this new piece by David Hammons is located at the same place along the west side shore where Matta-Clark’s was.

Day’s End, 2020, by David Hammons, looking west from Gansevoort Peninsula

David Hammons’s Day’s End for the Whitney Museum will be completed in May 2021.