Place
The High Line showed what could happen when a city found a second life for old infrastructure.
For decades, trains ran above the streets of Manhattan’s West Side.
The elevated railway opened in 1934 as part of the West Side Improvement, carrying meat, produce, and other goods directly into the factories and warehouses of the neighborhood. As trucking took over, rail traffic declined. The final train ran in 1980.
Then the tracks sat.
Plants began growing between the rails. Grasses and wildflowers spread across the structure. The old freight line became an accidental landscape suspended above Manhattan.
When demolition threatened the structure, neighborhood residents Joshua David and Robert Hammond founded Friends of the High Line in 1999 and began making the case for preserving it as public space.
That campaign eventually produced a new kind of park.
James Corner Field Operations led the design with Diller Scofidio + Renfro and planting designer Piet Oudolf. They worked with the character the abandoned railway had developed over time. Tracks were incorporated into planting beds. Paths moved through grasses, trees, and perennial gardens. Benches seemed to rise out of the paving. Windows opened views toward the streets, buildings, and Hudson River around it.
The first section opened in 2009. Additional sections followed in 2011 and 2014, creating a 1.45-mile park stretching from the Meatpacking District to West 34th Street.
The High Line also became part of a much larger transformation of West Chelsea. New York created a special zoning district around the corridor that preserved the structure while allowing new housing and development to grow around it.
And the idea traveled.
Cities around the world began looking again at abandoned railways, viaducts, industrial corridors, and other pieces of infrastructure whose original jobs had disappeared.
The High Line gave an old piece of New York another century of usefulness.
The High Line kept traces of both lives.
Railroad tracks still run through parts of the landscape. Planting recalls the grasses and wildflowers that colonized the structure while it sat unused. New paths, overlooks, seating, art, and gathering spaces fit around pieces of its industrial past.
That continuity is part of what makes the place work.
The freight railway had finished the job it was built to do. The structure itself still had value.
Cities are full of places like that. Old rail lines. Warehouses. Bridges. Factories. Utility corridors. Infrastructure built for an earlier version of the city.
The High Line offered a powerful example of what can happen when those places get another assignment.
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