DUMBO Archway Plaza

The massive stone archway you are standing under was completed in nineteen hundred and nine as a structural support for the Manhattan Bridge. For many decades, this space served as a bustling thoroughfare for Water Street, creating a vital link between the neighborhood's Gairville warehouses and the East River waterfront. In the nineteen eighties, the Department of Transportation seized the area, installing heavy gates and sealing it off to the public for seventeen years to use as storage space. This enclosure effectively blocked the neighborhood in half, turning a once-open passage into a dormant wall of steel and stone. The site was finally reclaimed and transformed into this public plaza in two thousand and nine, returning the soaring, cathedral-like space to the people who live and work here today.