These first images, via 2TheWalls, were taken by Jon Ericson and published in a 1983 issue of Torso Magazine:

There’d been a fire, and charred cinders were everywhere. Parts of the roof and walls had caved in. He realized he wanted to document this area of New York before it disappeared…

‘…Even though the photographs document a place at a certain point in its deterioration in a pretty objective manner, somewhow you can’t extricate the people completely from the phenomenon. Over the passge of time, they went in ther for the purpose of crusing, or to have an adventure in a non-commercial atmosphere, and they left these marks on the walls [along] with the elements.’

Four years earlier, in 1978, a different artist named David Wojnarowicz created a series of images called The Rimbaud Series which included these shots from inside the piers. (Wojnarowicz’s unidentified subject is wearing a paper cut-out from a photograph of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud; it’s "art.")

If it’s possible to have nostalgia for an era you never knew, then these images want me to return just for a few moments to the days when cruising came with community and eye contact took the place of pic trading. But after a few days at the piers, I think that a part of me would start to miss my Adam4Adam account. And there’s always Steamworks, right?

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Ericson Torso Piers (2TheWalls)