There's only one ... Pier 40 | OneFootball

Several years ago, a good friend and I found ourselves playing football (of the association variety) at our local park in Manhattan with a group of French visitors who had taken it upon themselves to dress nearly identically.

Since we couldn’t tell them apart and didn’t want to risk passing to the wrong team, we kept the ball almost exclusively between ourselves. At one point, they erupted in unison, screaming at us and threatening to walk away in protest. My friend volleyed back a typical New York insult, at which point one of the them squared him up and kicked him flush in the testicles.

This, in a nutshell, is Pier 40 — the place where I spent a good amount of my adolescence.

It’s a mad, wild and brilliant space located on the very western edge of lower Manhattan. You would be hard-pressed to find someone in New York who plays fútbol, as we often call it, and has not at least heard of Pier 40.

Even if you’re not from New York, you might have seen it. In aerial photographs of downtown, you will see old, ugly-looking industrial structure that jettisons out from the area around Houston Street into the Hudson River. It was once used as a marine terminal but was converted into a massive parking garage in the 1980s.

Today, the complex still houses plenty of parking space but inside the outer ring and on one section of the roof there is something far more magical: football pitches.

Those fields are the site of my earliest New York memories. I moved to the city around the time I was 12. Task number one was to find a football team to play for and, as it happened, one of the local clubs in my area was holding a pre-season training camp there.

My first experience of living in the city was running around with dozens of other kids on a scorching hot day at this bizarre concrete structure while admiring the views of the skyscrapers.

I didn’t know much about my new town but the whole thing just struck me as so New York. I would come to learn that Pier 40 is New York. In the ten years of living there, I never knew a more perfect symbol of everything that the city is: the good, the bad and the downright ugly.

As the months went on after my move, I started settling into life in the city. My club team sometimes trained at Pier 40 and a group of us began hanging around there. My friends and I noticed that there were always pick-up games going on or other (often older) boys wanting to play. Eventually we mustered up the courage to start joining in ourselves.

As we grew up and gained more independence with our time, the place became an addiction. We would go whenever we could, spending hours upon hours there before scrambling home for dinner.  My mother started saying to be home by 7pm when she wasn’t planning to eat until 8:30pm. She knew that leaving Pier 40 was like getting out of bed on a Sunday morning.

It was so easy to lose track of time there. There’s a small clock in the tunnel as you enter but once you’re inside time and all other concerns of daily life evaporate.

Yet, the real magic of Pier 40 is that it is simultaneously an escape and a perfect reflection of its environment. Physically, it’s separate enough to be its own world — unlike, say the famed basketball courts wedged between buildings on city blocks — but connected enough that you could never forget where you are. You can see the Empire State Building from just about anywhere and the view of the downtown skyline is as good as from any public park in Manhattan.

Structurally, it’s far from perfect (a bit like the city’s public transport infrastructure), but it gets the job done — most of the time. The pillars are so weak and old that the whole place is occasionally shut down because the authorities fear a collapse is imminent.

More than the geography and the architecture, though, it’s the people that give Pier 40 its character. To play a pick-up game at Pier 40, at almost any hour, is to take a trip around the world in the space of 10 minutes. Still to this day, I’m not aware of a single location that so consistently brings together people of different national, cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds. In any given game, you’d have Africans, Eastern Europeans, South Americans, Caribbeans, Middle Easterners and even the occasional ‘American’ American.

Even more incredible was the mix of types of people. Wall Street bankers would rub shoulders with orphan immigrants from Liberia. We had kitchen staff screaming at hipsters from Williamsburg and university students high-fiving high-school dropouts.

Even the top-tier professional players who would drop in from Manchester United (does David Bellion count?) or Sampdoria weren’t given any special treatment. The only thing that mattered was whether you could play.

A big part of the excitement, especially in the early days, was getting to play with our role models — older kids we dreamed of emulating but often wouldn’t dare approach. There was something addictive about trying to impress them and get their attention. We would scrutinise their style, their girlfriends and their footwork.

One mild autumn day, an older Albanian kid came in wearing a designer scarf while he played. ‘Damn,’ we thought, “that must be why he’s so good.” We went out and found scarves for ourselves and wore them to play in right through the winter and into the next spring. We must have looked awfully silly but man, we thought we were cool.

The winter actually presented its own challenges. In summer, it would get busy but we could more or less always find a corner to set up some goals with a pair of bags and make do. When it got cold, it would snow and the snow would freeze into ice over the whole field. There was a small indoor court but it was often locked and the surface was farcically dangerous. Plus, it’s not exactly the New York way to bundle up inside.

So, when we were snowed in but simply couldn’t live without our footie fix, we would dig. We used the goals as snowplows and improvised, clearing just enough space to be able to have a small-sided game. It was almost a competition to prove how dedicated we were by seeing what absurd subzero temperatures we could brave to get out there and practise our free-kicks on the ice.

Pier 40, like the city, does not sleep. You could arrive at any time of day and it would be there for you. It was better than having a girlfriend and significantly cheaper than drugs or alcohol. On Saturday evenings at midnight, when the rest of the city partied, you could find us at the Pier trying to emulate the latest Dutch freestyle tricks that we had seen on YouTube.

Sometimes we had the whole place to ourselves. Sometimes you had to fight everyone for your right to play. We would get into serious, threatening disputes with adults, baseball coaches, organised five-a-siders — basically anyone who actually had a real permit to use the field. We learned when to be diplomatic and when to launch a subway sandwich full of New York profanities.

But the Pier could also bring out the worst in us. Every once in a while an unsuspecting tourist or a banker playing Sunday league would show up with one of those professional Fifa-approved balls. We could spot them from hundreds of yards away. When we did, we worked together using the power of distraction to slip the ball into a bag undetected.  I’m not proud of that — I wasn’t a troublemaker — but it was what it was.

Yet, as lawless as the Pier could be, when it came to actually playing everyone knew the rules — or better said: everyone knew the theory. In fact, one of the underground Facebook groups created in a doomed attempt to bring some order to the chaos was called “Two goals, ten minutes.” It sounds simple but when you’re dealing with a mixed salad of nationalities, cultures and egos, the rules are never really straightforward. I’ve seen ten minutes last anywhere from five or six to 20 or 25. Even goals aren’t always clear cut.

The inevitable result was fights. And lots of them. When the city’s default mode is a scrap for survival, you can’t expect anyone to stroll peacefully into Pier 40 like they’re the Dalai Lama. There was a point where almost every changeover threatened to turn into a swapping of fists.

Of all my memories — good and bad — probably the most surreal came a few years ago. We were minding our business one empty July morning when some security-looking types came and instructed us to get off the field. We laughed. “This is practically our home,” we told them, “who are you and where did you come from?” “I’m serious,” one of them responded, “Get off. It’s important, you’ll see.” He wasn’t exactly the kind of guy you’d want to mess with, so eventually we did as we were told. They started setting up metal fences and some media with cameras and microphones trickled in. We were intrigued.

And then, a coach bus with tinted windows pulled up and off stepped … David Beckham, Thierry Henry and the rest of the Major League Soccer all-star squad. Despite already being 17 or 18 at the time, we were giddy with disbelief. Our childhood heroes had stepped off a bus and walked into OUR FIELD! OUR SHITTY, BROKEN-DOWN FIELD!

We were treated to what was almost a private training session with some of the world’s greatest players (and some MLS randos). There was Henry joking around and Beckham practising his free-kicks. We got to chat with them a bit afterwards and we told Beckham that he took some decent set-pieces. He smiled.

Reflecting on it afterwards, I realised how it probably wouldn’t have happened anywhere else. In another city, there would have been perfectly pristine grass pitches far away for these stars to train in peace. But this was New York, where people improvise and make do with whatever they can get. It was a place where the game was still developing and some of the world’s most famous faces could just train in a run-down public park without attracting too much attention.

I’ve been thinking about Pier 40 a lot lately, with everything going on in the world. I don’t go back there much these days but every once in a while, when I’m in New York, I round up some of the old crew and return to our footballing cathedral. There’s something that draws me back, something almost physical and I often get a bit emotional — like revisiting your childhood home.

Pier 40 taught me about life. It taught me about football. It taught me about the immense and very real power of the sport to bring people together. Lastly, it taught me my New York values — my poise, my perseverance, even my politics.

More and more, I think people need to know about New York. They need to know about the experiences and the relationships and the life that unfold when human beings open up and interact with one another.

They need to know about Pier 40.