History

For most of New York's existence this was where things were built, loaded and unloaded. Almost none of that is visible now.

The name

Corlears Hook takes its name from a Dutch colonist, van Corlaer, who held land at the point in the seventeenth century. 'Hook' is from the Dutch hoek — a corner or point — and it describes exactly what the place is: the corner where the East River bends.

The bend mattered enormously to sailing traffic, which had to work tide and wind around it. It is the reason the point was named and mapped from the very beginning.

Shipbuilding

Through the first half of the nineteenth century this shoreline and the stretch north of it were the centre of American shipbuilding. Yards along the East River built the clipper ships and, later, the steamships that made New York the dominant port on the continent.

The industry moved on as vessels grew and iron replaced wood, but it shaped the neighbourhood: the workforce lived immediately behind the yards, in the tenements that still stand.

The port

As shipbuilding declined, the shoreline became working cargo piers. Break-bulk freight — goods handled piece by piece by longshoremen rather than in containers — dominated into the twentieth century.

Containerisation ended it. Containers need enormous flat backland for stacking and cranes, which Manhattan does not have and New Jersey does. Cargo moved across the harbour, and pier after pier fell out of use through the 1960s and 70s.

Pier 42 was the last of them still working, and it closed in 1987.

The FDR Drive

The elevated highway along the shore was built through the middle of the twentieth century, and it did to this waterfront what similar roads did to waterfronts everywhere — separated the neighbourhood from the water at exactly the point when the water was ceasing to be a workplace.

The practical consequence is still the defining feature of the area. Every improvement scheme since has had to answer the question of how people get across it.

Housing

Much of the land behind the shoreline was rebuilt in the mid-twentieth century as large public and cooperative housing developments. That is why the built environment shifts so abruptly here from tenement blocks to towers in open space, and it is why the population immediately behind this waterfront is large, dense and has very little other open space.

That fact is the argument that every waterfront campaign here has ultimately rested on.