Pier 57
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Pier 57
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| Location | Corner of 15th Street and Eleventh Avenue (West Side Highway), New York, NY 10011 |
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| Built | 1950-1954 |
| Architect | Emil Praeger |
| NRHP Reference # | 04000821 |
| Added to NRHP | August 11, 2004 |
Coordinates: 40°44′36″N 74°00′33″W / 40.743396°N 74.009196°W
Pier 57 is a long pier located in the Hudson River on the west side of the borough of Manhattan in New York City. Opened in December 1954, it sits at the end of West 15th Street on Eleventh Avenue, just south of the Chelsea Piers sports complex.
Consisting of two stories above the waterline, the pier also has a concrete basement resting on the riverbed, and an Art Deco-style metal enclosure at the west end with stainless-steel signage reading "MARINE & AVIATION" and displaying the identifying designation "PIER 57". The headhouse at the east end of the pier is steel-framed with a brick exterior, bearing similar signage. The long sides of the structure are each topped with a line of continuous "burton" cargo handling frames, which allowed freight to be easily transferred to and from ships docked at the pier.
The pier is notable for being underpinned by three separate submerged buoyant concrete caissons, which are spanned by long steel girders supporting the building above. Designer Emil Praeger of the firm Madigan-Hyland had created similar structures as part of the American military effort in World War II, including temporary breakwaters that were used as part of the D-Day invasion. The caissons were constructed in 1951 and 1952 inside a diked and drained pond in Grassy Point near Haverstraw, New York, and after completion were floated down the Hudson to the site. The two largest (in terms of volume) concrete caissons are 360 feet (110 m) long, 82 feet (25 m) wide and 33 feet (10 m) high. The third is 375 feet (114 m) long, 25 feet (7.6 m) high, and of similar width to the other two caissons. The caissons weigh as much as 27,000 short tons (24,000 t), but float because they weigh less than the 47,000 short tons (43,000 t) of water that they displace. Their buoyancy supports 90% of the pier's weight, with the riverbed supporting the rest. The caissons, often referred to as concrete boxes and dubbed "Cheeseboxes" during construction, are laid out in a T-shape, with the two caissons of equal dimensions laid out from west-to-east, and the third from north-to-south. The caissons were placed on top of the wooden pilings of the original wooden pier, which were filled with sand and gravel. Dubbed "The World's Most Modern Pier" and the "Superpier", it was hailed as an innovative structure, being fireproof, extremely durable and immune to many of the problems that had historically plagued wooden waterfront construction.
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