Images courtesy of Diane Cook and Len Jenshel and taken from the April 2011 edition of National Geographic magazine – on the newsstands now.
Originally intended for demolition during the Giuliani administration, New York’s High Line has instead gone on to become one of the city’s most iconic public spaces – an impressive feat when considering what the city has to offer. Despite battling resistance throughout the design stage, this former elevated rail line somehow made the transition into a realised project, and the city is a better place as a result. The April issue of the National Geographic explores the High Line in more depth, along with some beautiful photos, some of which they have kindly allowed This Big City to reproduce:
Parks in large cities are usually thought of as refuges, as islands of green amid seas of concrete and steel. When you approach the High Line in the Chelsea neighborhood on the lower west side of Manhattan, what you see first is the kind of thing urban parks were created to get away from—a harsh, heavy, black steel structure supporting an elevated rail line that once brought freight cars right into factories and warehouses and that looks, at least from a distance, more like an abandoned relic than an urban oasis.
Until recently the High Line was, in fact, an urban relic, and a crumbling one at that. Many of its neighbors, as well as New York’s mayor for much of the 1990s, Rudolph Giuliani, couldn’t wait to tear it down. His administration, aware that Chelsea was gentrifying into a neighborhood of galleries, restaurants, and loft living, felt the surviving portion of the High Line, which winds its way roughly a mile and a half from Gansevoort Street to 34th Street (a section farther south was torn down years ago), was an ugly deadweight. They were certain this remnant of a different kind of city had to be removed for the neighborhood to realize its full potential.
Never have public officials been so wrong. Almost a decade after the Giuliani administration tried to tear the High Line down, it has been turned into one of the most innovative and inviting public spaces in New York City and perhaps the entire country.
The High Line once stretched farther into lower Manhattan, often passing right through factories. That southernmost section was torn down in the 1960s, long before any thought of turning the line into a park.
The unrenovated northern portion of the High Line turns westward, bringing the structure almost to the Hudson River. The rail company CSX still owns the section, but Friends of the High Line hope one day it will be part of the park. If that happens, the Fourth of July view witnessed by a staff member from the group and her companion could be enjoyed by many New Yorkers.
