Touring MEPA

Hudson Street in the Meat Packing District

On Sunday afternoon, I took a great walking tour with Bernie Cohen of Bernie's New York walking tours. Bernie does tours all over the city but this one was of the Meat Packing district or what the really cool kids call MEPA. A neglected neighborhood wedged between Greenwich Village and Chelsea, once filled with hundreds of meat processing plants (and the Nabisco factory where they made Milk Bone dog biscuits!), it is now one of the most posh neighborhoods in the city. It is filled with designer showrooms, fancy restaurants and boutique hotels.

View of the Highline Park from the Street

The tour included a history of the historic district and visits to some of the existing businesses in the area. The highlight was a tour of the Standard Hotel which straddles the new Highline Park and features floor to ceiling windows in all the rooms. (It has stirred up some controversy lately because of exhibitionism by hotel guests.) We saw three different rooms and the views were incredible.

View from Standard Hotel Looking Out Over the HighLine

The streets were also filled with trailers and equipment because they were filming Oliver Stone's Wall Street 2.

I can't really afford to shop or eat in MEPA, but walking around was cool. Oh yeah, and did I mention that there are still meatpackers in MEPA?