The High Line

There is a nifty little park called the Promenade Plantée in Paris on the Seine’s Right Bank. But this isn’t just any park. No, sir. This is a park perched 25 feet in the air on a former elevated railroad line. This is a park that meanders four and a half miles through the city, beginning near the magnificently unforgettable Opera Bastille and snaking between buildings and over intersections and across tree-lined boulevards before finally making its way to one of Paris’s many gardens on the outskirts of the city. Gone are the railroad tracks that once lined this railroad, replaced by cobblestone walkways weaving through islands of flowers and trees, benches and trellises overgrown with vines. Gone are the passenger and freight trains running its length, replaced by aimless Parisians who can finally enjoy a park that puts them where they always thought they should be: above everyone else.

Well done, Paris.  Well done.

Ever since I discovered that it existed, I was fascinated with this peculiar park, this Promenade Plantée. I don’t know if I was more intrigued by the fact that this park was one of the more odd examples of adaptive reuse I’d ever seen -- of taking a once bustling industrial artery driven through Paris and re-purposing it as a place of relaxation for whoever desired to wander down its path -- or by the fact that the park sat 25 feet in the sky.¹ Who wouldn’t be excited by this?²

I desperately wanted to visit during my trip to Paris a few years ago, but then when you’re competing with the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame, Montmartre and, well, mostly, Disneyland Paris, a four and a half mile long park on a former railroad viaduct isn’t exactly the easiest sell when discussing potential activities with friends.

A similar park just opened in New York, built atop a former elevated freight line -- once used to deliver milk, produce and meat (and, let’s be honest, probably hookers, too) -- to the warehouses and factories that populated Chelsea and the Meatpacking District (the name “Meatpacking District”, of course, coming from the fact that, before the warehouses in the area were converted into outrageously overpriced lofts, they were home to cattle slaughterhouses, and, who would have thought, meatpacking plants. Does knowing that the walls of your child’s bedroom were once speckled with the blood of slaughtered pigs and cattle help you sleep at night? I don’t know).

I may be revealing the previously unknown depths of my geekitude here, but when I was considering a move to New York, the fact that the High Line Park existed here may have weighed far more heavily in my decision than is, well, normal.³

Contrary to popular belief, New York is no Paris, and the High Line Park, I’m told, is no Promenade Plantée. The Promenade Plantée traverses Haussmanian boulevards lined with beautiful Second Empire townhouses, overlooked by balconies on which the occasional Parisian sits, sipping their coffee, watching (and, if stereotypes hold, judging) the crowds below, and travels from one Parisian landmark (the Opera) to another (the Bois de Vincennes). The High Line, on the other hand, travels past long abandoned warehouses of the Meatpacking District (though, as mentioned, most of these former warehouses have been converted into million-dollar condominiums for the super rich, a group which, fun fact, does not include me), alongside car parks and through (yes, through) the Chelsea Market. It’s an entirely different kind of cityscape altogether.

That doesn’t mean that the High Line Park isn’t pretty extraordinary, because it is. The main advantage it holds over the Promenade Plantée, at least for me, is that the signs along the route detailing its history are in English, and, as a result, I can read them.

The Standard Hotel: Le Curboisier would be proud.
If he weren't dead, but he is.  So there's that.

Like, for example: from 1847 to 1934 (prior to the construction of the High Line), freight trains picking up and delivering goods to the warehouses in the area traveled on the street -- 10th Avenue. The “West Side Cowboys”, really just men on horses,⁴ would ride in front of the trains with flags to alert pedestrians, carriages, buggies and anyone or anything else that might want to avoid being crushed beneath a freight train. Still, accidents happened as they so often do. So often, in fact, that 10th Avenue gained the rather descriptive nickname of “Death Avenue”.

Real estate prices plummeted, as you might imagine.⁵ “Death Avenue” and “Death Avenue-Adjacent”, it turns out, aren’t neighborhoods most people look to live in. Although, I would have made the same assumption about a place called “Hell’s Kitchen”, but then that’s one of the most desirable places to live in New York, so what do I know?⁶

After 87 years of living along Death Avenue, local residents and business owners finally decided that they’d had enough with the constant fatalities, and the 13-mile long High Line was constructed. Rather than building it directly above the street, like most elevated rail lines, the High Line traveled through the center of blocks and through the buildings to which the freight trains would be making deliveries.

There were two positive effects as a result of this new elevated line: (1) there were no longer untold numbers of people maimed and killed by fully loaded freight trains barrelling down a crowded city street during the midday rush hour; and, more importantly, (2) because the freight trains pulled right into the buildings where they were delivering their goods, up above the street and out of reach of anyone not working in the various factories, theft and pilfering was no longer a problem. Thus, it ended up saving money for the slaughterhouses, bakeries, manufacturers and Nabisco.⁷ It’s capitalism at its finest.

Of course, some might argue that the fact that, because the High Line was subsidized by both the City and the State of New York, to the tune of $2 billion inflation-adjusted dollars, and that, because rail freight traffic dropped off precipitously after fewer than three decades of use, and that, when it ceased entirely in 1980 it left a forlorn, dilapidated structure piercing through Manhattan’s west side, that perhaps this wasn’t so much a triumph of capitalism as it was a triumph of corporate welfare barrelling like an out of control freight train down Death Avenue. But those people are communists.

And I suppose one can’t overlook the thousands, perhaps millions,⁸ of lives the new elevated line might have saved, if that’s your kind of thing.

Regardless, the High Line stands now, a gratifying escape from the hustle of the streets below. Well, sometimes. And then sometimes it’s more overcrowded than a Californian prison. But that just speaks to its popularity, its “uniquity”, as they say in the travel industry.⁹ New Yorkers, like residents of any other city, love their novelties. And this park -- this newly constructed public space on an old elevated line -- this is almost as novel as it gets in New York.

I’m a particular fan of the juxtaposition of the old and the new. Here, with the High Line, urban designers have nailed that shit down. Not just in the park itself, either, although it is rather ingeniously landscaped to incorporate the former tracks, the ties and greenery reminiscent of that which once grew along the abandoned line. But, no, the neighborhoods around the High Line Park have also seen a recent invigoration of modern apartment buildings and lofts rising next to old warehouses and turn-of-the-century brownstones.¹⁰ The view across the rooftops is a disarraying variety of both modern glass-sheathed lofts and traditional brick behemoths; of sexy, curvy, Gehry-esque towers sitting next to stodgy, block-long Georgian apartment buildings and stately rows of Italianate townhomes; and the chaos is really quite striking. Some¹¹ might even say it’s beautiful.

Judging by this building in the center, apparently drinking
and architecting are no longer mutually exclusive activities.

Although the park isn’t as vast as Central or Prospect Parks, nor are there large, open fields or baseball diamonds, or lakes for boating, or hiking trails for hiking, what it does offer is perhaps just what I, and many others, are looking for. Because the High Line Park is a shift in what the definition of a public space is, and it’s a shift in who gets to define that public space. Were it not for a public outcry amongst New Yorkers, it’s very likely that the High Line Park would have been demolished. It’s only because of a popular (and, to be sure, well funded) movement to save the old freight line that the City of New York was forced to consider and finally approve the proposal to turn it into a new kind of urban park.

The Meatpacking District: It doesn't look like much, but that doesn't mean it still can't cost a fortune.

In many ways, what the High Line offers is a change of perspective. In a city you often experience with your eyes pointed upwards, toward skyscrapers that pierce into the clouds, the High Line is one of the few places where the most interesting parts of the city lie below you. Above you is a city you’ll rarely, if ever, visit. The High Line forces you to look down at the streets and the sidewalks -- and the shops, the restaurants, the grocery stores, the houses and the museums -- that you traffic every day. And it’s this change that gives the city an entirely different feeling. It feels that much more manageable. It’s a city that, for once, and if only fleetingly, feels entirely within your control.

The real world seldom feels like that, at least not to me -- at least not anymore. So a stroll along the High Line Park brings a welcome change.

What essay about New York would be complete if it didn't have a picture of
something with the Empire State Building hanging out in the background? 

¹ I’m going to be really honest with you. It’s the second answer.
² Don’t answer that. It’s rhetorical.
³ I may also have been overly excited that the Acela, the only high speed rail line in the United States, runs out of New York to cities along the Eastern Seaboard, even though I doubt I’d ever find occasion, or the money,¹² to use it.
⁴ As though there’s any other kind of cowboy.
⁵ I have no evidence to back this assertion up, but that’s never stopped me from making similarly unfounded assertions before.
⁶ Again, this is a rhetorical question.
⁷ Yes, Nabisco, the maker of the Oreo cookie, was once located in the building that is now the Chelsea Market. It’s a bit ironic, I think, that the building where a dessert that only just passes as edible was manufactured is now home to some of the most expensive and delicious bakeries in all of New York.
⁸ By some measures (i.e. the ones I just made up), billions.
⁹ They don’t.
¹⁰ Although, having recently turned through another century, I suppose that phrase doesn’t quite have the same meaning as it did in 1999.
¹¹ By “some” I mean “I”.
¹² I just footnoted a footnote. Huzzah!