19. Shadows of The West Side Piers

In the 1980s and 90s, the decaying shipping warehouses of Manhattan’s West Village were a world entirely of their own. 

For thousands of marginalized queer youth, trans women, and outcasts pushed to the fringes of the city, the rotting timber and pitch-black labyrinths of Piers 45, 46, and 50 offered a vital sanctuary. 

It was the cradle of the underground ballroom scene and a place of unapologetic freedom.

​But the dark hides everyone equally.

​In this episode of Homocidal Tendency, we step off the cobblestones of West Street and into the shadows to explore how the ultimate haven became a hunting ground. 

We unpack the deeply atmospheric and terrifying history of an era where unchecked predators, roving gangs, and police apathy turned the waterfront into a literal trap, and how the city eventually paved over the history of the people who fought to survive there.

​In this episode, we cover:

• ​The Concrete Labyrinth: The imposing architecture, isolation, and daily dangers of living on the rotting wood of the West Village piers.
• ​The Cruising Scene: How the mechanics of the post-Stonewall underground nightlife inadvertently created the perfect camouflage for serial killers.
• ​The Bag Murders (CUPPI): The chilling 1970s string of dismembered victims found in the Hudson River, the connection to The Exorcist extra Paul Bateson, and the permanent shadow of dread left behind.
• ​The Ramrod Massacre: The horrific November 1980 mass shooting carried out by Ronald Crumpley that proved the perimeter of the waterfront was just as deadly as the dark.
• ​The Loss of a Legend: The tragic 1992 death of LGBTQ+ icon and waterfront protector Marsha P. Johnson, the highly contested police ruling, and the massive community uprising that followed.
• ​Erasure: The city’s decision to bulldoze the crime scenes for luxury real estate and the ghosts still lingering beneath Hudson River Park.

​Resources & Visuals:

To truly understand the monolithic scale and raw atmosphere of the waterfront, you have to see it. Head over to our social media to view the incredible, gritty photography of the era, including works by artists like Alvin Baltrop.

• ​Instagram, TikTok & BlueSky: Search for Homocidal Tendency (remember, that’s Homocidal with an 'O') and hit that follow button for behind-the-scenes updates and historical episode graphics.

https://linktr.ee/HomocidalTendency

​Support the Show:

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​Stay out of the dark.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:14

Imagine Manhattan in the nineteen eighties, but take away the neon, take away the flash, the noise, and the Wall Street money, and the crowded avenues. Keep walking west, past the streetlights, until the concrete turns to cobblestone, and the cobblestone drops off into the black water of the Hudson River. Here, rising out of the water like skeletons of dead leviathans were the west side piers. Massive, decaying shipping warehouses left to rot by the city that had moved on. Inside it was a labyrinth, cavernous, pitch black, with the roof caved in so you could see the moonlight bleeding through. For the thousands of marginalized queer youth, trans women, and outcasts who were violently pushed out of the city's glowing epicenter, these rotting monoliths weren't just abandoned buildings. They were a sanctuary, a place to throw parties, to connect, to exist completely free from a society that didn't want them. But there's one thing about the dark. The very isolation that made the piers a haven also made them a hunting ground. The police refused to patrol the decaying timber. There was no cameras, no neighbors to hear you scream. If you walk deep enough into the shadows of Pier 45, you could never be sure if that person walking towards you was looking for a connection or a victim. And when the bodies started washing up against the pilings, the city didn't even blink. First off, I can't believe we're already kicking off episode 19. Thank you to everyone who's been listening and sharing the show. If you are enjoying the dark history and the deep dives we do here, please take a second to rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whatever platform you have to be listening on right now. Also, if you want to see the visual side of the case, and you will, because the architecture of these decaying warehouses is absolutely wild, make sure you're following the show on social media. You can find all the historical photos, behind the scenes update, and episode graphics over on Instagram, TikTok, Blue Sky. Just search for homicidal tendency and smash that follow button. If you've been riding with me through our first 18 episodes, you know we usually zero in on a specific killer or a specific case. But for this one, I wanted to mix things up. I never want to just keep hammering away at the same exact formula week after week. And sometimes to truly understand the horror of an era, you have to look past the individual predators. You have to look at the environment that gave them the cover to hunt in the first place. So we aren't just tracking a single suspect, we're exploring an entire landscape of terror. Because in this story, the monster isn't just a person, it's a place. But the Westside Piers weren't just abandoned buildings, they were monolithic. Let's rewind for a second. Back in the early 20th century, these periods were bustling. They were the glamorous epicenter of New York's shipping industry. If you were crossing the Atlantic on an ocean liner, this is where you docked. But by the 1960s and 70s, the shipping industry completely changed. Container ships took over, and they needed massive ports in New Jersey, not the narrow slips of Manhattan. So the city simply walked away. They padlinked the chain link fences and left these massive steel and timber cathedrals to rot in the salt air. By the 1980s, the piers, specifically 45, 46, and 50 along the West Village had become a sprawling post-apocalyptic labyrinth. To truly grasp the tragedy of the violence that happened at the piers, you have to understand who was actually living in the shadows of these corrugated steel walls. The people who claimed the West Side Piers weren't the affluent white Chelsea club goers who had the luxury of safe mainstream gay bars. The population out on the Rottingwood of Pier 45 and 46, they were overwhelmingly black and Latino queer youth, transgender women, drag queens, and runaways. These were the kids who had been violently rejected by their families in the 70s and 80s. They arrived in New York City with nothing but the clothes on their backs, only to find that even with the mainstream gay rights movement of the era, they were often pushed to the absolute fringes. So, they built their own world on the edge of the water. If you look at the raw, gritty black and white photography from artists like Alvin Baltrip, who spent years basically urban exploring the piers just to document the secret hidden lives inside, you see this incredible striking duality. On one hand, it was a cradle of immense defiant culture. This was the birthplace of the modern ballroom scene. If you've seen Paris' burning, the energy of those underground balls, the voguing, the runaway walks, and the fierce found families known as houses spilled right out onto the streets of the pier. These piers were where the kids of the houses of Extravaganza or the House of Lobesia would go and practice their routines, soak up the sun, and socialize. Older trans women, often known as mothers of the community, would look out for the younger runaways, teaching them how to survive on the street. It was a massive, makeshift family living in the ruins of the industrial age. But the flip side of that vibrant culture was absolute grinding desperation. Survival of Impears was brutal. There was no running water, no heat during the freezing New York winters. Many of these kids were completely locked out of the formal economy. They couldn't get regular jobs because of intense discrimination, and shelters were notoriously unsafe for trans women and queer youth. So to eat or to scrape together enough cash to rent a cheap motel room in the meatpacking district just to get out of the cold, many turned to survival. Their survival ended up being sex work right there in the dark corners of the warehouses. This is the agonizing reality that set the stage for the horrors to come. The predators who drove to the west side didn't just know where to hunt, they knew who to hunt. They targeted a population of outcasts, kids whose families weren't going to report them missing, kids the New York Police Department actively harassed rather than protect. The killers knew that if a sex worker went missing from deep within the labyrinth of Pier 50, there would be no amber alerts, no search parties, no press conferences. The subculture of the piers was beautiful, resilient, and fiercely loyal, but to the monsters prowling the cobblestone streets of West Street, they were just invisible. Pier 45, right at the end of Christopher Street, was the absolute epicenter. By day it was the ultimate sanctuary. The roof had partially caved in, like we said, letting the sunlight pour down onto the rotting floorboards. But Pier 46 and Pier 50, those were different animals. As you moved further away from Christopher Street, the structures got darker, more degraded. Their corrugated steel walls were covered in layers of gritty, spray painted murals and graffiti. The deeper you walked inside, the less light there was. It was a maze of rusted shipping containers, collapsed support beams, and pitch black corners. When we talk about the dangers out on the piers, you have to understand that the people living in those shadows were fighting a war on four entirely different fronts. If you step past that chain link's fence on West Street after midnight, you were walking into a meat grinder. The first danger was the architecture itself. We talked about the rotting floorboards, but the environment was actively hostile. There was no lighting, zero. And in the dead of the New York winter, the wind whipping off the Hudson was absolutely paralyzing. You had kids huddled around trash can fires deep inside Pier 46, accidentally setting blazes that would engulf the dry rotting timber of the warehouses, and if the floor gave away beneath you in the dark, you didn't just fall into the water. The currents of the Hudson around the piers are notoriously brutal. If you drop through, the freezing water and the undertow would pull you under the pilings before anyone even heard a splash. But the environment was nothing compared to the human element. The second major danger came from the city itself, the bridge and tunnel hate crimes. Through the eighties and into the nineties, it became a horrifying weekend pastime for gangs of young straight men from other boroughs or New Jersey suburbs to drive down to the West Village with baseball bats, lead pipes, and knives. They explicitly went down to the waterfront for the thrill of hunting queer kids. They knew they could corner them at the edges of the piers. These weren't robberies, they were brutal, coordinated beatings, and sometimes the attackers would literally force their victims over the edge into the river. And if you managed to survive the elements of the roving gangs, you had to face the third danger, the New York Police Department. If you were violently assaulted inside Pier 50 and managed to crawl back out to the cobblestones of the West Street, running into a cop was a massive gamble. NYPD's Public Morals Division frequently raided the waterfront, but they weren't there to protect the community from killers. They were there to sweep the area. If a trans woman or a queer sex worker reported an attack, they were highly likely to be the ones thrown into the back of a squad car for loadering, prostitution, or simply for wearing clothing that did not match the gender on their ID. The systematic apathy was suffocating. The police treated the victims as the criminals, which created an impenetrable wall of silence. And that wall of silence brings us to the fourth and most terrifying danger of all. Because when you have a pitch black labyrinth rune filled with marginalized people who have no homes, who are actively being hunted by violent gangs, and cannot, under any circumstances, go to the police for help, you've built the ultimate hunting ground for a serial killer. These monsters who drew out to the west side didn't bring baseball bats, they brought ligatures, they brought garbage bags. They knew that in the chaos of the piers, amidst the transients and the runaways, a missing person wouldn't be noticed for days, if ever. The killers operated with absolute impunity, hiding right in the dark, letting the elements of the gangs and the police provide the perfect cover for murder. Before we talk about the bodies that started washing up against the pilings, you need to understand exactly how someone could just vanish from the waterfront in a crowd of hundreds of people. We have to understand the actual mechanics of the cruising scene. In the 1970s, right on the heels of the Stonewall riots, the stretch of the West Village became a mecca for radical, unapologetic sexual liberation. During the day, the outer edges of the piers were jokingly called the meat rack. Hundreds of men would lay out on the rotting woods, sunbathing and socializing. But when the sun went down, the ecosystem completely changed. If you wanted total isolation, you bypassed the streetlights and walked deep into the monolithic warehouses of the piers. The collapsed roofs, rusting shipping containers, and blown-out office rooms created a massive, unlit maze over the freezing water of the Hudson River. The cruising scene in the dark was defined by profound heavy silence. Nobody really spoke. Communication was basically nonverbal, guided by eye contact. The environment was completely deprived of light, you navigated purely by touch and sound, inhaling the heavy scent of the salt water, rotting timber, and the sharp metallic sting of poppers. The only illumination would come from the cherry of a lit cigarette or the sudden brief flare of a match striking against the corrugated seal. Just enough light to barely illuminate a stranger's face before you were plunged right back into the pitch black. The entire subculture was built around the concept of unseen anonymous encounters. You were supposed to walk into the pitch black room with a total stranger, you were supposed to be perfectly quiet, you were supposed to stay in the shadows where the police couldn't see you. It was absolute freedom, but it was also the perfect mathematical equation for a trap. Because the rules of the cruising scene were the exact same rules as serial killer needed to operate it. A predator didn't have to break into someone's home or lure a victim into an alley. The victims were already walking into the darkness completely willing. All a killer had to do was stand perfectly still in their labyrinth and wait for someone to walk up to them. And in the mid-1970s, someone in the dark was doing exactly that. Someone who wasn't just killing men, but meticulously dismembering them, wrapping them in heavy plastic, and dropping them into the freezing undertail. It was a terror the press would eventually dub the Bag Murders. Between 1975 and 1977, the dark water of the Hudson River started delivering secrets to the edge of the West Village. Six different men were discovered floating in the river, washing up against the rotting wooden pilings of the piers. The condition of the bodies was horrifying. The victims had been meticulously dismembered and wrapped tightly in heavy black plastic trash bags. The NYPD's response was chillingly apathetic, because the victims were gay men, many of whom were drawn from the leather scenes and underground bars near the waterfront. The police didn't prioritize the investigation. In fact, when they cataloged the victim's clothing, they stamped the evidence boxes with the acronym CUPPI. It stood for Circumstances Unknown Pending Police Investigation. Because of this, the unknown predator started to be referred to in the underground scene as the CUPPI killer. Now, if you're a horror fan, the primary suspect in the case is gonna make your blood run cold. The investigation eventually zeroed in on a man named Paul Bateson. Bateson was an X-ray technician, but you may actually recognize him. In 1973, he was cast as a background extra in the iconic film The Exorcist. He's the medical assistant in the deeply unsettling scene where the young girl Reagan gets an angriography. Bateson was ultimately arrested and convicted in 1977 for the murder of a film journalist named Addison Vero, but while he was sitting in jail at Rikers Island waiting for trial, he reportedly started bragging to another inmate. He allegedly claimed that Vero wasn't his only victim and heavily implied that he was the one cutting up men and dropping the plastic bags into the Hudson. The NYPD and the prosecutors considered Bateson their prime suspect for the bag murders. But here's the devastating part. They never officially charged him with them. They felt like they already had a life sentence for the murder of Errol, so they didn't want to spend the money or the time pursuing justice for six dismembered unnamed gay men from the waterfront. Yeah, that's like some straight up bullshit. Bateson went to prison and the CUPBI cases were left officially unsolved, but the damage to the community psyche was permanent. Even though the bag murder supposedly stopped, the trauma soaked right into the wood of the West Side Piers. As the 80s rolled in and the new generation of queer youth claimed the crumbling warehouses as their sanctuary, they were living with a ghost story that was completely real. They knew the precedent had been set, they knew the predators looked at the piers and saw a blind spot, a place where you can go do the most unspeakable things to a human being, wrap them in a plastic, and drop them into the water, and the city wouldn't even bother to investigate. The Bag Murders didn't just leave bodies behind, they left an atmosphere of total suffocating vulnerability that would define the waterfront for the next two decades. Now, I know that's a massive amount of history to unpack. The Paul Basin case, from his bizarre connection to the Exorcist to the infuriating refusal of the city to officially pursue justice for six dismembered men is massive. It's a massive, terrifying rabbit hole all of its own. It's entirely too big just to be a footnote in this episode. So trust me, we will eventually circle back around and do a full dedicated episode on Bateson and the true scope of the bag murders. But for now, we have to keep moving forward into the 1980s. We have to look at the permanent shadow those unsolved murders cast over the waterfront. Because for the kids sleeping out on the pier, the nightmare was only just beginning. When we talk about the violence of the Westside Piers, it's easy to picture all the horrors safely contained within the rotting walls over the water. But the terrifying reality of 1980s New York was that the perimeter was just as dangerous as the labyrinth itself. The violence wasn't just waiting for you in the dark, it was spilling right out onto the cobblestones of West Street. To paint the picture, directly across from the abandoned piers was a thriving, unapologetic strip of underground nightlife. This was the epicenter of the city's leather and levi scene. You had legendary, heavy-handing bars like the spike, the anvil, and the ramrod. Guys would spill out of these clubs, shoulder to shoulder on the sidewalks, drinking, smoking, and cruising in the shadows of the elevated highway. It was a community standing right on the edge of the abyss, completely unaware that the abyss was about to reach out and pull them in. The date is November 19, 1980. A thirty-eight-year-old former transit worker named Ronald Crumpley was driving a stolen Mercury van through the West Village. Crumpley was deeply disturbed and violently homophobic. He had become utterly obsessed with the idea that gay men were quote unquote agents of the devil, who were, in his twisted mind, ruining the neighborhood. But Crumpley didn't just have hatred, he had an arsenal. Inside that van, he had a cache of stolen weapons, including two 9mm semi-automatic pistols and an Uzi submachine gun. Around midnight, Crumple drove past the pier, slowing down as he approached the crowded sidewalk outside the ramrod. Without warning, he leaned out the window of the van and opened fire directly into the crowd of the men standing outside the bar. The street erupted into absolute chaos. Men dove behind parked cars and pressed themselves against the brick of the walls as bullets tore through the storefronts. In the matter of seconds, Crumpley shot six men, George Renz, the 21-year-old dormant at the Ranrod, and Vernon Croning, a 32-year-old, were both killed. Four others were severely wounded. Crumpley hit the gas and fled, leading police on a massive high-speed chase that ended with him crashing the van and engaging in a shootout with officers before he was finally dragged into custody. When they interrogated him, he showed absolutely zero remorse, telling detectives, I'll kill them all. They're no good. Crumpley was eventually found not responsible by reason of mental disease or defect and was locked away in a psychiatric facility. But the damage he did to the psyche of the Westside was irreparable. The Ramrod massacre, as it became known, wasn't just the shooting. It was the moment the community realized they were living under a state of total siege. The Ramrod massacre was a massive, highly public explosion of violence. So yeah, so that's another big one from history that is it deserves more than just to be a footnote in today's episode, so we'll come back around to that one. The Ramrod massacre was a massive, highly public explosion of violence. But the everyday grinding terror of the 1980s waterfront was often much quieter, and it came in two very different, deeply sinister forms. The first was the horrifying normalized trend of the Hudson Toss. We talked about the Roman games of youth, the bridge and tunnel crowd, driving into the West Village to hunt. But what often gets unreported is how they killed. It wasn't just the beatings, it was one of the most terrifying modus operandi of the 1980s hate crimes. It was to corner the victim at the very edge of pier 46 or 50, beat them, and then physically throw them into the freezing, fast-moving current of the Hudson River. The killers knew the undertow around the pilings was brutal. They knew if someone was unconscious when they hit the water, they would be swept under the piers and swallowed by the river. For years, bodies were pulled from the water, and the NYPD would routinely classify them as accidental drownings or suicides, completely ignoring the blunt force trauma the victims had suffered before they went into the water. Look at the psychological toll here. Put yourself in the shoes of a queer kid living on the west side in November of 1980. If you stayed in the light and go to the bars, you might be gunned down on the sidewalk by a fanatic with an Uzi. If you retreat into the dark and hide in the piers, you might be hunted and thrown into the Hudson by a serial killer. If you manage to survive an attack and go to the police, you're treated like a criminal. And then looming over all of this, just starting to be a whisper through the hospitals and clinics, was a mysterious, deadly new virus that didn't even have a name yet. But then the second major trauma to hit the waterfront in 1980 wasn't a gang or a serial killer, it was a movie. If you want to talk about True crime bleeding directly into pop culture, you have to look at the film Cruising, directed by Wim Freakin and starring Al Pacino. The movie was completely inspired by the real life horror of the bag murders and the meat packing district serial killers we've been talking about. But here's where the story gets completely unhinged. Freakin didn't shoot his movie on a Hollywood back lot. He brought Al Pacino and a massive film crew right down to the West Village and the meat packing district to shoot on location. They were literally filming a slasher movie about a serial killer hunting gay men in leather bars in the actual leather bars, while the real killers were still uncaught and the real community was still actively being hunted. The community was completely outraged. They felt the film was incredibly stigmatizing and was essentially painting a target on their backs right as the violence at the piers was hitting a fever pitch. There were massive literal riots in the street, people brought whistles and air horns to disrupt the audio of the filming. Some residents even stood on the roofs of their apartments and shined massive mirrors directly into the camera lenses to ruin the lighting. It's a surreal, terrifying snapshot of the 1980s in New York. You had people fighting for their lives against the elements of the rotting wood of the piers, you had serial killers dropping bodies in the Hudson River, and right across the cobblestones, Hollywood was setting up lights to turn their ongoing nightmare into an erotic thriller. The lines between reality and horror were completely erased. By the time the early 90s rolled around, the survivors of the West Side Piers were exhausted. They had endured a decade of unchecked serial predators, roving gangs, police harassment, and the absolute devastation of the AIDS epidemic. But they held the line, and the reason they were able to hold that line, the reason the most vulnerable youth on the pier survived at all, was because they had protectors. People who stood between them and the dark. And no one stood taller than Marcia P. Johnson. If you know queer history, you know Marsha. She's an absolute icon. A veteran of the 1969 Stonewall Uprising. They called her the mayor of Christopher Street. With her signature radiant flower crowns and her fearless energy, Marsha was a permanent picture on the waterfront. For the homeless queer youth, the runways and the trans kids living out on the rotting wood of Pier 45, Marsha was quite literally a mother. She fed them, she guided them, she fiercely protected them. If a kid had nowhere to sleep, Marsha found them a spot. If the police were harassing the youth, Marsha was the one stepping between the nights and the kids. She was the heart of the piers. Which is what makes the summer of 1992 completely agonizing. On July 6, 1992, just days after the city's annual pride parade, a body was discovered floating in the murky water of the Hudson River, just off the edge of the West Village Piers. It was Marcia. The community was completely shattered. The heart of the waterfront had been ripped out, but the grief almost instantly mutated into absolute white hot rage. Because practically the second Marcia's body was pulled from the water, the NYPD made their ruling. Without conducting a massive, immediate criminal investigation, they declared Marcia P. Johnson's death a suicide. The people of the piers, they knew it was a lie. Marcia was not suicidal. Furthermore, the physical evidence of her death was highly suspicious. Friends and activists noted that she had a massive gaping wound on the back of her head. Witnesses immediately came forward and stated that they had seen Marcia being harassed and chased by a group of thugs near the waterfront shortly before she disappeared. But the police refused to listen. To the NYPD, this was just another body from the piers. Another marginalized person who had gone into the river. Another case they could just stamp close without doing the work. But this time, the city had picked the wrong victim to sweep under the rug. Marsha's death had become the ultimate boiling point for the West Side. The community snapped, they mobilized, taking to the street in massive, furious protest. Activist groups practically laid siege to the police precincts, handing out flyers, demanding justice, and forcing the system to acknowledge that a legend had been murdered. The fight over Marsha's death wasn't just about a single tragedy, it was about a massive collective scream from the waterfront. It was an indictment of an entire city, a demand to end the systematic decades-long erasure of people who lived, fought, and died in the shadows of the piers. The sheer volume of protests meant that the NYPD and their local government could no longer pretend the West Side Piers didn't exist. But if the community thought that this meant the city was finally going to step in and protect them, they were tragically mistaken. When the city of New York finally decided to quote unquote clean up the waterfront in the late 90s, they didn't do it to make the piers safe for the marginalized youth who lived there, they did it for real estate. The cleanup wasn't a rescue mission, it was an eviction. The city systematically cordoned off the area and brought in the heavy machinery. The massive cavernous warehouses of Pier 45, 46, and 50. The spaces that had served as the cradle of the underground ballroom scene, the sanctuary for the runways, and the hunting ground for the predators were completely bulldozed. They tore up the running floorboards, they dismantled the corrugated steel. They didn't just demolish the buildings, they demolished the crime scenes. By tearing down the piers, the city efficiently erased decades of history. They erased the vibrant culture that fought so hard to survive in the dark, and simultaneously, they paved over the blood of the victims who never made it out. If you go to the West Village today and walk down the end of Christopher Street, the environment's completely unrecognizable. The monolithic pitch black ruins have been replaced by the Hudson River Park. It's pristine. There are perfectly manicured lawns, expensive roller skating rings, beautiful, sun drenched esplanades lined with luxury high-rises and million-dollar condos. It is one of the most expensive, desirable stretches of real estate in the world. People jog with their dogs right over the exact spots where the bodies used to be pulled from the water. There are no plaques for the kids who froze to death in the winters of the 1980s. There's no memorials for the victims of the Hudson Toss who were thrown into the freezing currents by roving gangs. Aside from a relative recent monument dedicated to Marcia P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera nearby, the physical memory of the old waterfront has been almost entirely sterilized. I mean it's a beautiful park today, but for those who know the history, the pristine grass and expensive views feel like a very heavy, very deliberate cover-up. The Westside Piers are gone, but the ghosts of the West Side are still right there, buried under the concrete, waiting for someone to finally tell their story. When you really look at the history of the Westside Piers, the most terrifying part isn't just the sheer violence that happened in the dark. It's the staggering scale of what was ignored. It's incredibly difficult to nail down an exact official statistic of how many people were murdered on the waterfront between the late 70s and mid-90s. And the reason it's so difficult, it's it's by design. We know about the six men from the bag murders. We know about Marsha P. Johnson, but beyond the cases that forced their way into the headlines, they're still the John and Jane Doe's. Throughout the eighties and nineties, dozens of bodies were pulled from the Hudson River along the stretch of the West Village. And time and time again, the NYPD stamped the file as suicides, accidental drownings, or overdoses. They looked at the blunt force trauma, the defensive wounds, and the sheer impossibility of the circumstances, and they chose to look the other way. The system didn't just fail the victims of the piers, it accurately erased them. The killers who stalked those rotting warehouses used the city's prejudice as their greatest weapon. They knew if you dropped a marginalized person into the freezing currents of the Hudson, the city wouldn't bother to pull them out, let alone hunt down the person who pushed them. The Westside Piers represent a profoundly dark chapter in true crime history. It was a place where a community built a vibrant, beautiful sanctuary out of little garbage and decay, only to realize that the city had essentially locked them inside a cage with the monsters. The physical piers are now gone, buried under green grass and concrete. But we cannot let the people who died in the shadows be paved over with them. We have to keep saying their names. We have to keep looking into the dark. Thank you for joining me on this deep dive. If you want to see the haunting raw photography of the piers that we discussed, head over to Instagram, TikTok, Blue Sky, and follow the show at Homicidal Tendency. Remember it's an O homicidal tendency. If you appreciate these deep dives into the unreported corners of the true crime world, please take a second to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or whatever platform you're listening on. Like I said, it's the absolute best way to support the show and keep us moving forward in the algorithm. I'm Matt, and this has been Homocidal Tendency. Until next time, stay out of the darkness.