NEW YORK (AP) — It was once a gritty stretch of Manhattan known for rail yards, warehouses and aging industrial buildings, so desolate it was dubbed “The Wild, Wild West.”

Now, one of the nation’s biggest private construction projects is transforming a stretch of Manhattan’s West Side into a cluster of 20 new buildings — 17 of them high-rises — so tightly packed that it has earned a new, not always complimentary, nickname: “Hong Kong on the Hudson.”