West Side Highway

The Joe DiMaggio Highway, commonly called the West Side Highway and formerly the Miller Highway, is a 5.42-mile-long (8.72 km) mostly surface section of New York State Route 9A (NY 9A), running from West 72nd Street along the Hudson River to the southern tip of Manhattan in New York City. It replaced the West Side Elevated Highway, built between 1929 and 1951, which was shut down in 1973 due to neglect and lack of maintenance, and was dismantled by 1989. North of 72nd Street, the roadway continues as the Henry Hudson Parkway.

The current highway was complete by 2001, but required reconstruction after the September 11 attacks that year, when the collapse of the World Trade Center caused debris to fall onto the surrounding areas, damaging the highway. It uses the surface streets that existed before the elevated highway was built: West Street, Eleventh Avenue and Twelfth Avenue. A short section of Twelfth Avenue still runs between 125th and 138th Streets, under the Riverside Drive Viaduct. Eleventh Avenue is a separate street north of 22nd Street. The portion between West 42nd Street and Canal Street is part of the Lincoln Highway.

The highway is a six-to-eight lane urban boulevard, with the northernmost section, from 59th Street to 72nd Street (signed as the Henry Hudson Parkway), a freeway elevated above a former rail yard adjacent to tracks still used by Amtrak. Trucks and buses are allowed only on the surface section. The West Side Highway's surface section takes three names: West Street from the Battery Park Underpass north to Tenth Avenue, then Eleventh Avenue to 22nd Street, and finally Twelfth Avenue to 72nd Street.

The highway begins from Battery Park close to the mouth of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel where it also accepts traffic from the southern terminus of FDR Drive. From there, the route passes close to the site of the World Trade Center at Vesey Street. The route continues with this name passing by numerous piers along the Hudson River until Gansevoort Street in the Meatpacking District where it becomes Eleventh Avenue.

Eleventh Avenue begins just north of the intersection with Tenth Avenue. The highway is concurrent with Eleventh Avenue north of this point, passing by the 14th Street Park at 14th Street. The highway continues with this name alongside the Chelsea Piers until it reaches 22nd Street where the highway branches off from Eleventh Avenue onto Twelfth Avenue.

At 22nd Street, the highway continues as Twelfth Avenue passing by the Chelsea Waterside Park. It passes just west of the Javits Center from 34th Street to 38th Street and over the Lincoln Tunnel at 39th Street. The road continues past the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum and Piers 84 to 92, a major cruise ship terminal building. At 59th Street, the highway becomes an elevated freeway and at 72nd Street, the highway becomes the Henry Hudson Parkway.

Various proposals circulated in the 1920s to build an expressway on the west side. Among the proposals:

Manhattan borough president Julius Miller said that something had to be done right away and ultimately pushed through the plan for the West Side Elevated Highway, which was to eventually bear his name. The proposal immediately ran into stiff opposition. The City Club and New York City Mayor James J. Walker objected to the highway on the grounds that it would block waterfront-bound freight traffic. At the time, West Street exhibited a "daily avalanche of freight and passengers in traffic", and was "walled by an unbroken line of bulkhead sheds and dock structures" blocking the view not only of the river, but even of the ships being serviced, and the commerce carried out on those piers and slips was vital to the economic health of the city. They believed that the plans should wait until the surface railroad tracks were removed in the area, at which point the elevated highway might not be necessary. Many objected that it would be ugly. Finally, in 1929, construction started, and the section between Canal Street and West 72nd Street was completed in 1937, with a "Southern Extension" to the Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel completed in 1951.