Under the West Side Highway
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Under the West Side Highway

"Under the West Side Highway"
1966 (Greenwich Village Period)

This is one of the places where I used to go and sit down, spend a bit of time, get quiet and think for a while.  Now the West Side Highway is gone.  Since that truck fell through it a few years back they tore it down.  In the background is Hoboken, New Jersey and a freighter in the Hudson River.

Yes, the West Side highway is no more (here indicated by the detail of one of it's steel girder columns).  To people my age that would be unthinkable.  How could they get along in Manhattan without an elevated highway on the South Side?  It's a simple answer.  Economics, or the lack of it.  This is a look at the appalling poverty of a populous who fail to learn to properly harness the economic potential of an area.  But then, that's what they get for relying on people they think know what they're doing.  This, mind you, is the failure of the era of the college education.  The incompetent do-nothings who are only skilled at pretending to know it all.  They can't afford to keep up the infrastructure.  It's like this elevated highway.

A while back when the truck feel through, actually on an "on ramp" and they tore down the whole thing.  There are still parts of it uptown, however, around the area of Grant's Tomb.  I used to come out here on the West Side beside the river during times of  personal depression to sit next to the Hudson River and, as one period poet put it, "...look at the robot vomit on the other side...".  The two automobiles in the drawing must be the type of affordable second hand vehicles the types of guys who would be parking there would use.  There's a freighter in the drawing, too.  Probably unloading stuff in Hoboken.  That's before they really got into using containers.

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Artwork by Paul A. L. Hall

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