Description: Not for tourists--really
New York City is a city of bridges. In Hedda Sterne’s landmark painting New York, N.Y., 1955 , excerpted above, the city’s bridges are manifest. Swift and sweeping brush strokes resemble the girders that lift us — our vehicles, our bodies — above the Hudson and East rivers, across an expanse of water, and into an outer borough. While the Meatpacking District is void of bridges, Sterne’s painting makes its home there, in this neighborhood, at the newly erected Whitney Museum of American Art.
One thing we all know about New York is that the only constant is change. The Meatpacking District is either the impetus of such change or the byproduct of the city’s own deep-seated inertia — I cannot tell which is more true (but this website will tell you this neighborhood is the change agent of the borough). Since moving to New York more than 10 years ago, I have been to the Meatpacking District only occasionally. Each time, something is new, either removed or replaced.
These days, the small neighborhood in the deep west of Manhattan feels like a Fifth Avenue imprint with an artistic bent whose provenance maps back to before the Whitney descended. Maybe it’s the streets paved of Belgian blocks , commonly and erroneously called “cobblestones” which harken back to an older, less hectic time. Or maybe it’s the quasi-creative types who wander the streets with Moleskines in their backpacks du jour (is it Fjallraven now?) and feast off trust fund accounts to aid their penchant f