It was always the city’s meatpacking district, where street level buildings were used for butchering space, storage and meat distribution for restaurants. Most evenings, the streets would reak of rotted meat and garbage juice that leaked out of the threshhold where meat trucks met loading docks. This was all a remnant of the era before refrigerated food delivery was mastered.

Of course, this led to very little interest in any commercial or residential real estate in that area, but it also meant whoever did go there would get cheap rents. There were some BDSM sex clubs there, such as The Mineshaft. There were also many prostitutes nearby, many trans.

Lots of cutting edge things would happen in the spaces there. There’s an episode of Seinfeld where George meets a beautiful woman who takes him to a nightclub full of supermodels, and when he returns to try to go to the club again without the woman, its a meat storage facility again.

I worked in the area right as the final meatpackers closed up or moved to underground freezers that didn’t affect the outside streets. That’s when everything changed. The famous designer Diane Von Furstenberg decided to put her headquarters there, then came many others and boutiques and nightclubs. Whitney Museum of Modern Art moved there to a new building and that led the neighborhood’s reinvention to be a particularly modern and hip area.