Chronicles: Gansevoort Market

As a modern day visitor to the bustling and trendy Meatpacking District of New York City, it is easy to forget the meaning behind the name of the area or that you are even in NYC at all; its beautiful people decked in expensive clothes are more reminiscent of LA. But what is now a trendy night spot, home to clubs and pricey lounges, used to house over 250 slaughterhouses. It is not the clicking of high heels you would have heard on the cobbled streets in 1900, but rather cow hooves as they marched down 11th Avenue to their doom.

Less than 35 of those slaughterhouses stand today, housed in the same stalls whose metal awnings a hundred years ago were built to provide shade to workers unloading meat from trucks. The many other stalls are inhabited by high-end boutiques and designer labels. There was a time though when neither the elite nor the cows would venture through Gansevoort Market, the 1980s. During those years, the market became known for drugs and prostitution. It was only in the late 1990s that the area saw a renaissance and both fashion and old world business was allowed to thrive.
 
Gansevoort Market/Meatpacking District
W 16th St., Ninth Ave., and Hudson St., Gansevoort St.; West St. and Eleventh Ave., New York, New York

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