Decode the Meatpacking.

Three Lives of Gansevoort Street

At its peak in the early 20th century, the Gansevoort Market District contained more than 250 slaughterhouses, meatpacking plants, and cold-storage facilities crammed into a few blocks just west of Greenwich Village. Livestock arrived by barge along the Hudson, were walked through the streets to holding pens, and processed in buildings whose drains ran into the cobblestones. The West Washington Market — which had operated on this site since 1879 — was the largest meat distribution hub east of Chicago. Above the streets, the elevated rail line of the New York Central Railroad's West Side Line carried refrigerated cars of beef and pork directly into the upper floors of the packing buildings, a system so efficient that meat moved from the Hudson docks to restaurant kitchens without ever touching the ground. When the last meatpacking businesses left in the 1990s, the iron hooks and the refrigerated loading bays they left behind became the raw material for something no one had planned.

The neighborhood's second life began in the dark and remained there for nearly two decades. By the 1980s, the same low rents and industrial spaces that had sheltered the meat trade attracted an underground scene that the city preferred to ignore: leather bars, drag clubs, sex workers, and the queer ballroom culture that held its own ceremonies in the cold-storage vaults. The Vault at 28 Ninth Avenue, the Hellfire Club, and the 24-hour diner Florent at 69 Gansevoort Street (open from 1985 to 2008) served as anchors for a nightlife ecosystem that was simultaneously hidden and defiant. Florent's owner, Florent Morellet, pasted the rising HIV death count on a chalkboard beside the day's specials. The cobblestone streets that had been stained with blood now bore a different kind of grief, and a different kind of joy. The abandoned West Side Line overhead was used as a dumping ground for old cars and vegetation so dense it became an accidental garden in the sky.

The third transformation began in 1999, when Pastis restaurant opened at 9 Ninth Avenue and signaled to the fashion industry that the neighborhood was safe to colonize. Diane von Furstenberg moved her flagship studio and store to 874 Washington Street. Alexander McQueen opened at 417 West 14th Street. The derelict elevated rail line was converted into the High Line park, which opened in 2009 with the Standard Hotel straddling it at 848 Washington Street. The Whitney Museum of American Art opened its Renzo Piano–designed building at 99 Gansevoort Street in 2015. A StoryHunt through the Meatpacking District reads all three layers at once: the meat hooks still bolted to the walls, the faded handwriting of Florent's menus, and the design-world logos now occupying buildings where cattle once waited. The cobblestones under your feet are original Belgian blocks from the 1880s. Everything else has changed at least twice.