After New York’s shipping industry declined, the Hudson River piers along Manhattan’s West Side were largely abandoned. By the 1970s their decaying sheds and waterfront spaces had become important gathering places for gay men, offering freedom and privacy at a time when homosexuality was still widely stigmatized and discriminated against. Most of the old piers were eventually demolished or redeveloped as parks, leaving little physical evidence of the communities that once occupied them.

I photographed the abandoned Hudson River piers in 1975 and again years later. Their history became personal through a fraternity brother who was gay, later became an activist in New York and died of AIDS. Knowing him changed the way I understood the piers—not simply as abandoned waterfront, but as a place where people created a community when much of the city excluded them.