If you are walking along West Street (here its name becomes Twelfth Avenue), you see an elongated concrete bunker painted with aggressively ugly cartoons of sporting activities; there is no perceptible entrance door on the street itself, or any way of peering in at the activities. The leasing of some floor space for movie soundstages and fashion shoots may explain the lack of windows, but not the tacky fafade presented to the public, which seems intentionally to mislead about the wellappointed facilities within. Staring at this eyesore, you would be hard put to connect it with its original graceful fafade, by Warren & Wetmore, the architects who built Grand Central Station and the New York Yacht Club. A photograph of the piers when they opened in 1910 shows a breathtaking repetition of archwindowed doorways and pedimented roofs, fronting a West Street haunted by horsedrawn cabs. As the authors of New York 900, Robert A. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin, and John Montague Massengale, describe ll> Warren & Wetmore invested the fashionable Modern French fa9ades h a strikingly monumental grandeur and simplified but overscaled etails. The river fafades, which sheltered open observation platforms, СГе contrastingly festive transformations of the utilitarian steel piers which lay behind the street fafades, and greeted the arriving passenge with a flutter of pennants and trophies." In 1910, a day after the piers' official opening, The New York Тг!Пе; j called them "the most remarkable urban design achievement of theij day. . . . The Chelsea Piers replaced a hodgepodge of rundown waterfront structures with a magnificent row of grand buildings embellished with pink granite facades." The 8oofootlong finger piers were designed expressly for the new transatlantic luxury liners, such as the Cunard Line's Mauretania or the Lusitania (which departed from Chelsea Piers before being sunk by a German Uboat). Before it struck an iceberg, the Titanic had been scheduled to dock at Chelsea Piers. We tend to forget that many immigrants arrived first at Chelsea Piers, before being transferred by ferryboats to Ellis Island. The famous were frequently snapped waving from its gangplanks. In 1927 the lie de France put in at its Pier 57, and introduced a new standard of ocean liner style. Chelsea Piers played an important role as a troop terminal in both World Wars, but the Depression and jet travel cut into its luxury liner business, and container ships requiring larger berths spelled its doom. By the late 1960s Chelsea Piers' shipping days were over, and it became a municipal bus storage and a U.S. Customs impounding station. Decaying walls, shattered windows, and structural dilapidation led Mayor Lindsay's administration to employ the stopgap measure of enclosing it in a concrete casing, which gave it its present homely facade. Thus the Chelsea Piers sports complex we see today cannot be accused of destroying an architectural landmark; if anything, it has preserved the bones of the original.