Goodbye New York

Coco McPherson has lived in the Meatpacking District for 25 years ... and has had a front-row seat to its slow death march toward glitz and glass. At her photo-driven site Goodbye New York, McPherson captures three vanishing areas of the city.

As she writes on the site: "The original High Line, the old meatmarket -- before it was banished to the Bronx -- and Coney Island are three of the most beautiful, dreamlike places in New York City."

Here are two of her shots...

The Kelly Building circa 1984 at 400 W. 14th St. at Ninth Avenue. In the 1970s, it was home to The Toilet... Now it's the Gaslight...



The next photo is titled "Digging the Hotel Gansevoort" from 2000. McPherson writes: "I can't remember when they started building that hotel, but this was Day One as they began to rip up the parking lot. Amazing how big and out of place the hotel is, how ugly, and how small and beautiful the scale of the neighborhood once was."



Check out the rest of photos at Goodbye New York.

McPherson contributed an essay to the Voice's "Best of New York" issue in 2000... in the "My Obsession" section:

Until recently, the meat market was my secret dreamworld, a place most alive in the middle of the night, surreal for its rows of hanging animal carcasses and the white-coated men — with names like One-Eye (blinded by bleach after he bugged a waitress once too often), Dog Eddie, and Rabbit — who attended them, and the prostitutes who fought on the cobblestoned streets and who later gathered at Dizzy Izzy's (closed this spring) for coffee. All this is over now, and a new neighborhood is rising like Disney's version of New Orleans, drunk and rich, with lots of money and a little help from writers who shill for developers in the Sunday real estate section. My neighbor rides around on his bicycle shouting into a bullhorn, "Go back to Soho," and like a gentle but insistent traffic cop, "Soho is south of here," and only occasionally, "GET OUT OF MY NEIGHBORHOOD." Indeed.