New York Passenger Ship Terminal

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New York City Cruise Liner Teminal in Hell's Kitchen at 52nd Street.
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New York City Cruise Liner Teminal in Hell's Kitchen at 52nd Street.

The New York Passenger Ship Terminal (also known as the Luxury Liner Row or Manhattan Cruise Terminal or New York Cruise Terminal) is terminal for ocean going passenger ships on Manhattan's west side.

The terminal consists of Piers 88, 90, 92 and 94 on the Hudson River between West 46th and West 54th Street. In 2003, the terminal handled 900,000 passengers. The city is forecasting that 1.5 million will use the terminal by 2017.

Ships now dock at Piers 88, 90 and 92. Pier 94 on the north side is now used for exhibition space. In doing renovations, the city is also considering decommissioning Pier 92.

The piers are 1,100 feet long and 400 feet apart. They were first completed in 1935 to replace the Chelsea Piers as the city's luxury liner terminal. The new terminal was built to handle bigger ships that had outgrown the Chelsea Piers. The piers were renovated in 1970 and are currently undergoing another $150 million renovation. The renovated plans call for it to handle three large ships at a time.

For the past few decades the terminal was the only ocean-going passenger terminal in New York harbor. With an upsurge in cruise ship traffic and the terminal's ability to only comfortably handle three large ships at a time, two new terminals have opened in the habor — the Cape Liberty Cruise Port opened in 2004 in Bayonne, New Jersey and the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal opened in 2006 in Brooklyn, New York.

The West Side Highway takes a small jog east from the piers to below West 42nd Street because when the terminal was built land had to be taken away from Manhattan to allow for longer piers. The Navy, which controlled the waterfront dimension, said no longer piers could extend into the river. So the city extended the pier by cutting away at the land. The city also did this for the Chelsea Piers however in Chelsea only landfill was taken away. At the Passenger Terminal actual Manhattan schist was taken away.

Almost all major trans-Atlantic ships have docked there including the RMS Queen Mary 2 and Freedom of the Seas. The SS Normandie caught fire and sank at its Pier 88 berth during World War II.

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