Josh Lubin-Levy: I'm Josh Lubin-Levy. I'm a former Joan Tish Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and I helped to develop the queer history walks in 2017.

Stina Puotinen: Hi, my name is Stina Puotinen, and I'm excited to lead you all on a queer history walking tour of the Meatpacking District.

Josh Lubin-Levy: Sitting here looking out at the West Side Highway and the Hudson River, we're going to be talking about the queer history of the Meatpacking District, which is the neighborhood in which the Whitney is currently located. To think about that history, we actually have to think about the queer history of New York City itself. 

Stina Puotinen: So whereas northern and upper Manhattan was historically residential, the southern parts of Manhattan, closer to the factories of Soho and the industries on the east and west side, became havens for counter-cultural life. So it really starts with the idea of the industrial city taking people out of the conventional family unit and it makes sense then for queer communities to gather there.

Josh Lubin-Levy: You have this possibility for new forms of social and intimate life, that people hadn't really seen before. 

You can also look at the Hudson River and imagine that these peers were part of that bustling life. You had travelers arriving and departing, dock workers loading and unloading cargo, and you had kids and sailors even swimming in the Hudson River itself.

But by the second half of the 20th century, the commercial activity along the piers began to decline. By the 1970s, the piers were all but abandoned, completely dilapidated, as the movement of bodies and goods had been largely replaced by air travel and interstate highways and cargo shipping no longer in use. There were certain plans that floated through the city in the fifties to turn this area into a park, but then by the 1970s, with the economic decline, those plans were abandoned, and the piers were pretty much left to rot.

The piers themselves, however, were not abandoned. These really precarious structures became a hub of both artistic and sexual experimentation.