The Meatpacking District is a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Manhattan that stretches from West 14th Street south to Gansevoort Street and east to Hudson Street. It is located between the Hudson River and the Hudson Street Bridge. The Meatpacking Business Improvement District extends these boundaries further north to West 17th Street, east to Eighth Avenue, and south to Horatio Street, with the northern boundary extending as far as West 17th Street.
It is located on the far west side of Manhattan in the Meatpacking District, which is a fashionable business district. The Whitney Museum of American Art, high-end designer apparel stores, and a segment of the High Line, an elevated park built atop disused railroad lines, may all be found in this neighborhood. Aerial view of the cobblestone streets, which are lined with trendy restaurants and clubs that have taken over the enormous spaces that were originally occupied by the namesake meatpacking facilities.
The development of the region that is today known as the Meatpacking District began in the middle of the nineteenth century. For centuries before then, it had been the site of Fort Gansevoort and the upper extension of Greenwich Village, which had been a popular holiday destination until it was displaced by the northward expansion of New York City. The conflict between the Greenwich Village street system and the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811, which aimed to impose a regular grid on the undeveloped portion of Manhattan Island, led in the formation of irregular street patterns in the neighborhood.
Residences in the neighborhood – mostly rowhouses and town houses, some of which were converted into tenements – began to be built around 1840, with the majority of them being built in the Greek Revival style, which was popular at the time. By the mid-century, with Fort Gansevoort replaced by freight yards of the Hudson River Railroad, a neighborhood developed that was part heavy industry and part residential – a pattern that was more typical of an earlier period in the city’s history but was becoming less common as industry and residences began to be isolated in their own districts as industry and residences began to be isolated in their own districts.
Construction of a terra cotta factory and heavy industry were located in the western portion of the neighborhood, while lighter industry, such as carpentry and woodworking, lumber yards, paint shops, granite quarries and a plaster mill, were found in the eastern portion of the neighborhood, which blended into the residential area. During the Civil War, the area west of Ninth Avenue and Greenwich Street and above 10th Street was home to a large number of distilleries that produced turpentine and camphene, which was used as a lamp fuel.
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