Corlears Hook
The bend in the river where Manhattan turns north-east, and the mile of shoreline either side of it.
Corlears Hook is the name of the point where the East River changes direction — the sharp bend between the Brooklyn and Williamsburg Bridges. Boat traffic has had to navigate it for four hundred years, which is why it has a name at all when most of Manhattan's shoreline does not.
The land behind it is the Lower East Side waterfront: a stretch that spent a century as working piers, then several decades as the back of the neighbourhood, and is now — after an enormous and contentious rebuilding — becoming public parkland again.
What is here
- Pier 42 — Manhattan's last working cargo pier, now a park
- East River Park — and the coastal resiliency project that rebuilt it
- The greenway — walking and cycling the east shore
- History — shipbuilding, the piers, and what Corlears Hook was
- Getting here — the FDR problem, and how to cross it
The thing to understand first
This waterfront is separated from the neighbourhood behind it by the FDR Drive, an elevated and at-grade highway running the full length of the shore. You cannot simply walk to the water. You cross at specific points — pedestrian bridges and underpasses — and knowing where they are is most of the practical knowledge required to use this waterfront at all.
That separation is also the reason the shoreline was neglected for so long, and the reason every plan for it over the past thirty years has been, in one way or another, a plan about crossing a road.