The Golf Club driving range at Chelsea Piers in New York City on an spring afternoon.
The Golf Club, a driving range, and sunbathers at Chelsea Piers on the Hudson at West 18th Street. The piers have been a recreation area since the mid-1990s, but a century ago, on April 20, 1912, the RMS Titanic was scheduled to dock right here. Before there were piers in the river on this spot, there was landfill, and about eighteen blocks of the long-gone Thirteenth Avenue. Because of a dispute with the Army, which prohibited the city from building into the river beyond a certain point, room for the piers had to be made by removing shoreline. The firm that built them, Warren & Wetmore, also designed Grand Central Terminal at around the same time, and for the same purpose: to get more people into and out of the city, faster, and in style.