West Side Highway

On December 15, 1973, an 80-foot section of New York’s elevated West Side Highway collapsed beneath a dump truck overloaded with asphalt. The asphalt was meant to repair the road. Instead, it helped kill it.

The city closed the crumbling highway, but large stretches remained standing for years while officials debated what should replace it. What should have been an embarrassment soon acquired an unlikely second life: New Yorkers began slipping onto the abandoned roadway on foot.

Joggers ran where cars once idled. Bicyclists pedaled along the Hudson. Weeds pushed through cracks in the pavement as graffiti spread across the guardrails. Suspended above the city and largely emptied of traffic, the decaying highway became an accidental promenade with sweeping views across the river.

Demolition eventually erased nearly all of the old elevated highway, while a much larger battle over the proposed Westway replacement dragged on until 1985. The highway never returned, and the waterfront was gradually reimagined for recreation instead. Today, much of Manhattan’s Hudson shoreline is occupied by Hudson River Park, an outcome few could have predicted when a truck full of road-repair asphalt fell through the road it had come to fix.