Thirteenth Avenue is a street in the New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

 borough

Borough (New York City)

New York City, one of the largest cities in the world, is composed of five boroughs. Each borough now has the same boundaries as the county it is in. County governments were dissolved when the city consolidated in 1898, along with all city, town, and village governments within each county...

 of Manhattan

Manhattan

Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...

, USA, built on landfill

Land reclamation

Land reclamation, usually known as reclamation, is the process to create new land from sea or riverbeds. The land reclaimed is known as reclamation ground or landfill.- Habitation :...

 in 1837 along the Hudson River

Hudson River

The Hudson is a river that flows from north to south through eastern New York. The highest official source is at Lake Tear of the Clouds, on the slopes of Mount Marcy in the Adirondack Mountains. The river itself officially begins in Henderson Lake in Newcomb, New York...

, though only a block of it still remains.

On an 1891 Bromley map, it is shown heading north from 11th Street to around 29th Street, where it became 12th Avenue.

In the early 20th century, New York was looking to build longer piers along the Hudson to accommodate bigger ships such as the RMS Lusitania

RMS Lusitania

RMS Lusitania was a British ocean liner designed by Leonard Peskett and built by John Brown and Company of Clydebank, Scotland. The ship entered passenger service with the Cunard Line on 26 August 1907 and continued on the line's heavily-traveled passenger service between Liverpool, England and New...

 and the RMS Titanic. However, the United States government, which controls the bulkhead line

Bulkhead line

Bulkhead line is an officially set line along a shoreline, usually outside of the dry land, to demark a territory allowable to be treated as dry land, to separate the jurisdictions of dry land and water authorities, for construction and riparian activities, to establish limits to the allowable...

, refused to allow longer piers to be built.

The shipping companies were reluctant to build longer piers further uptown because existing infrastructure such as the tracks of the New York Central Railroad

New York Central Railroad

The New York Central Railroad , known simply as the New York Central in its publicity, was a railroad operating in the Northeastern United States...

 and the 23rd Street

23rd Street (Manhattan)

23rd Street is a broad thoroughfare in the New York City borough of Manhattan. It is one of few two-way streets in the gridiron of the borough. As with Manhattan's other "crosstown" streets, it is divided at Fifth Avenue, in this case at Madison Square Park, into its east and west sections. Since...

 ferry station were already in place to support Manhattan's ships.

New York City then took the unusual step of removing the block of landfill south of 22nd Street so the Chelsea Piers

Chelsea Piers

Chelsea Piers is a series of piers on the West Side of Manhattan in New York City that was a passenger ship terminal in the early 1900s that was used by the RMS Lusitania and was the destination of the RMS Titanic....

 could be constructed to handle the luxury liners.

A small section north of Gansevoort Street, the West Washington Market, was left as an exception and this became a peninsula (Gansevoort Peninsula). The only remaining block of 13th Avenue, behind the Bloomfield Street Sanitation Depot across the West Side Highway

West Side Highway

The West Side Highway is a mostly surface section of New York State Route 9A that runs from West 72nd Street along the Hudson River to the southern tip of Manhattan. It replaced the West Side Elevated Highway, built between 1929 and 1951, which was shut down in 1973 due to neglect and lack of...

 from Gansevoort Street, is currently used as a parking lot for garbage trucks and New York City Department of Sanitation

New York City Department of Sanitation

The New York City Department of Sanitation, or DSNY, is a uniformed force of unionized sanitation workers in New York City. Their responsibilities include garbage collection, recycling collection, street cleaning, and snow removal...

employees' vehicles; this remnant of the avenue bears no signage identifying it as 13th Avenue. Proposal have been made for a sandy beach, or for a garbage transfer pier.