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How the Piers StandCurrent uses and plans for the West Side riverfront area 1. Pier 40. Formerly a parking lot and off-loading point for paperand coffee until it was closed last month. 2. Between 35th and 40th Streets. Planned Hudson River Center, a minicity of hotels and condo towers. 3. Battery Park City. Expansion above current site. 4. Pier 42. Open to public. Used for play and fishing. 5. Pier 45. Open to public. Used for play and fishing. 6. 14th Street. Barges loaded with garbage for dumping. 7. 30th Street. Port Authority Heliport. 8. 48th Street. Port for ocean liners, including the QE2. 9. Piers 81 and 83. Port for Circle Line tours. 10. Pier 84. Site of summer concert series. 11. Pier 86. Site of Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum. 12. West Side Highway. Closed; under consideration for various rebuilding plans after the defeat of Westway project. 13. Pier 4. Proposed site of new ferry terminal. 14. 15th Street. Proposed site of floating Transit Authority bus depot. The emergency closing of Pier 40 this month did more than throw a few thousand car owners and warehousemen into a panic: It dramatized the war being fought over Manhattan's entire far western flank.
With billions of dollars in real estate profits at stake, there's an all-out scramble to shape what developers see as a five-mile stretch of rotting piers and crumbling shoreline, what many residents cherish as a treasure of open space, and what a few diehard bluecollar advocates view as the last chance to hold onto Manhattan's industrial strength.
"West Side waterfront property," said urban expert George Sternlieb of Rutgers University, "is hotter than a pistol."
Agreed the New York Real Estate Board's Steven Spinola: "It is the new frontier."
City planners downplay the likelihood that political blood will flow as both hot-shot land dealers and environmental activists move into this urban version of the Wild, Wild West.
But at hand today, slinging political firepower, are people who fiercely want parks for the populace, feeding grounds for the fish, and huge luxury minicities with moorings for 150-foot yachts. There are voices, as well, for the traditional marine and rail freight enterprises that earned New York its fame as the world's greatest port.
And to squeeze...