Baltrop’s photographs capture the grandeur of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century piers, their vast hallways and broad corrugated walls, and the play of light through metal beams and open doorways. And they demonstrate that waterfront cruising, like the cruising scene in Central Park in the 1960s, was not only a nighttime activity, as numerous couples and groups dot the sides of the piers in the bright daylight of summer. Men are pictured cruising in Pier 52, the site of
