From Miss Rosen’s article for Huck:
West Side Highway—In the late 20th century, the area was an if-you-know-you-know hotspot for the city’s gay scene. William Howell’s new photobook immortalises it.
With the arrival of AIDS, the piers had evolved into a community pushed to the very edge of the earth as the relentless onslaught of gentrification began to transform the last vestiges of downtown’s queer underground into a bourgeois playground. “The piers was a refuge for people like us, who were LGBTQ+. It was a sanctuary where people could go be their authentic selves,” says photographer William Howell, who has just published a collection of scenes from the era in West Side Highway (Dark Entries Editions).