CHAPTER EIGHT

GREEN PROMENADE AND ELEVATED RAIL SPUR

The High Line

In 1980 a train carrying three carloads of frozen turkeys rumbled along the 1.5-mile-long elevated trestle called the High Line into the manufacturing, warehousing, and meatpacking district located around Gansevoort and Washington Streets on Manhattan’s far West Side. It was the last train to run on the High Line. The tracks had been elevated in 1934, after years of agitation over the frequent accidents at the on-grade pedestrian crossings along Tenth Avenue—or Death Avenue, as it was then called. But eventually containerized shipping made the West Side docks obsolete, and interstate trucking had caused a severe decline in rail transportation. Half a century after its inception, the useful life of this Hudson Line spur was over. Yet its owner, Conrail, did not want to shoulder the cost of taking it down.

For the next twenty years, as the railroad company made periodic efforts to sell off this unconventional piece of real estate, the surrounding neighborhoods of Chelsea and the upper West Village were changing. The blocks of abandoned or marginally occupied buildings were steadily being converted into residential lofts, designers’ studios, architects’ offices, art galleries, and hip boutiques—a second-generation SoHo. If they thought about it at all, both the new occupants and pedestrians passing through the area wondered what this unusual overhead structure could be as it snaked into view and then disappeared again into warehouses where there had once been second-floor loading docks. Some passersby found the elevated track on which nothing moved intriguingly enigmatic, but most residents of the Chelsea Historic District to the east of Tenth Avenue thought of it as a blight on their neighborhood. Considering it an impediment to development, nearby property owners formed an association to urge its demolition.

Because it is thirty feet above street level, practically no one noticed that the High Line was also changing—but quite differently from the neighborhoods below. While the railroad company and City Hall dithered, time set in motion the inevitable process of decay and revegetation that makes all open-air ruins, even industrial ones, romantic evocations of the past. Slowly, inexorably, inconspicuously, nature was reclaiming a small piece of Manhattan. In a short time, a wide variety of plants had spontaneously seeded themselves in the spaces between the slowly rotting ties, and the disused rail bed had transformed itself into a linear meadow of wildflowers. The story of how the serendipitous vegetal colonization of this piece of abandoned train track inspired an elegantly designed, seven-acre public park is one of the most impressive chapters in recent New York City history.

From Novel Notion to Visionary Design

The story begins in 1999 when Robert Hammond, a young man who lived in the West Village just below the southern end of the High Line, found his curiosity piqued by the puzzling piece of overhead industrial infrastructure he saw on his daily comings and goings through the neighborhood. Hearing that there was to be a community planning board meeting to discuss its future, Hammond decided to attend. As he listened to testimony that made the High Line’s removal practically a fait accompli, he began to think it a shame that this relic of New York’s past was being torn down. Only one other person in the room—Joshua David, who lived a few blocks to the north in Chelsea—seemed to share his contrarian view. After the meeting they exchanged business cards, then met again. As they talked about how to save this derelict piece of cityscape, they conceived the idea of forming an advocacy organization, which they named Friends of the High Line.

When the two subsequently obtained permission from the railroad to get up on the trestle, they stared in amazement at the ghostly sight of the steel rails, rotting ties, and the greenery growing up through the gray ballast in the roadbed. They were thrilled by the stillness and the breathtaking vistas of the Hudson River and surrounding city. They knew then that they wanted the High Line revived and put back into use, but in what way? One possible answer was light-rail transportation—an elevated subway line like the ones that used to run above Third and Sixth Avenues. But soon their first impressions of the place began to rule their thinking. Hammond says, “Our goal became to make what felt like a very private and privileged experience—almost like entering a magical world combining wildscape and incredible urban vistas—available to others without destroying that feeling.” He and David began to envision the High Line as an elevated, linear park.

At the time Hammond was a business consultant versed in Internet marketing and David a freelance writer on subjects such as travel, fashion, and food; neither of them knew much about the workings of government or how to go about preserving a historic landmark. They started out by consulting with members of the Central Park Conservancy and others who had formed public-private park partnerships. Looking for a precedent for an elevated park, they discovered the Promenade Plantée in Paris. Built on an abandoned nineteenth-century railway viaduct in the twelfth arrondissement, this 2.8-mile-long tree-lined walkway punctuated with individual garden areas did not to their way of thinking provide the right model. They preferred something that retained a semblance of the abandoned High Line’s nature-taking-its-astonishing-course character, while at the same time capturing its potential as a free-flowing recreational space.

Joshua David

Robert Hammond

Establishing an organizational profile and raising money were obvious first priorities for Friends of the High Line, along with building trust among the different interests involved—neighbors, real-estate developers, City Hall, Community Board 4, Chelsea gallery owners, and others. Although the administration of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani had authorized the demolition of the trestle, Hammond and David’s project had the good fortune to be endorsed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg immediately upon his taking office. But this critical boost for creative idealists treading on government turf was only the beginning. David’s role was to sell the idea to all the disparate factions; this meant attending an almost endless number of evening meetings with local block associations and holding pizza parties for the residents of the nearby housing projects. It also meant simply getting out on the street in order to let people know that an organization called Friends of the High Line existed. “Flyers on lamp poles—you can’t believe how important they are if you are trying to reach people in a geographically defined community,” David says. “In the beginning, our voices simply weren’t being heard. I did heavy, heavy papering of the neighborhood.”

Meanwhile, Hammond was engaged in a different sort of networking. “I’m a problem solver,” he says. “My biggest talent is getting people together.” His first effort was to build an electronic database by creating an e-mail list of all his friends and the friends of those friends. The next was to create a website that allowed Friends of the High Line to reach beyond this initial e-mail list and become a membership organization. Paula Scher, of the well-regarded graphics firm Pentagram, offered to create its signature logo and a correspondingly understated graphic style for all the publicity material. But Hammond realized that more was needed to promulgate the vision of the High Line that he and David shared. People had to be able to see what it looked like from above as well as below. Knowing that a professional landscape photographer, Joel Sternfeld, lived nearby, he contacted him.

Although Hammond may not have been aware of it at the time, Sternfeld, who is known for his utopian and dystopian depictions of place, had already displayed an interest in abandoned infrastructure; his book on the Roman Campagna contains many beautiful images of the first Claudian aqueduct. When Hammond took Sternfeld up on the High Line on a cold day in March 2000, the photographer was immediately hooked. As the two men stood in the strange quietness and gazed at its tangle of volunteer vegetation and the crossing and curving lines of the steel tracks, Hammond’s idea of commissioning a publicity shot became for Sternfeld a yearlong project.

Provided with a pass by the railroad company, Sternfeld documented the site through the changing seasons. He only photographed, however, when the sky was a neutral gray: “I wanted it to be clear in the pictures that if there was glory in the High Line, it wasn’t due to my skill as a photographer,” Sternfeld says. “By not borrowing beauty from the sky, the High Line itself is what is important in the picture.” More often than not, he set up his view camera with the lens pointing straight down the tracks:

This sounds like a very obvious decision—to follow a path—but it is not. I was only ten when I read Thoreau. In time I read other nature writers such as John Burroughs, Henry Beston, and Edwin Way Teale, but it was the writings of Joseph Altsheler that most influenced my work on the High Line. Altsheler wrote a series of “boy’s” books that bore the general title of The Young Trailers. In these wilderness tales, skill in reading a path was a central element driving the drama. I decided to photographically follow a path. I felt as if I was the representative of eight or nine million New Yorkers who didn’t have access to this secret landscape. I wanted to give them an unmediated sense of what it would be like to walk the High Line.

If nature was the first implicit partner on the High Line’s yet-to-be-named design team, Sternfeld’s compelling photographs, showing how the abandoned railroad trestle had already become a work of art, provided a compelling paradigm from which landscape architects might take their cues. His book, Walking the High Line, published in 2001, is a remarkable collection of views that reveal asters, goldenrod, Queen Anne’s lace, and long grasses improbably set against a skyline background that includes the Empire State Building. And they depict not only the High Line’s loveliness in summer but also its beauty in fall, when the dry grasses form a tapestry of ochre and sienna, and its graphic appeal in winter, when the dark steel rails appear as an elegant linear abstraction etched upon a band of white snow.

The High Line, 2000

COURTESY OF JOEL STERNFIELD
Looking East on 30th Street on a Monday Morning in May

The evocative photographs of the serendipitous garden in Sternfeld’s book and the accompanying exhibition at Pace/MacGill Gallery in the fall of 2001 were captivating. David made a point of getting other Chelsea gallery owners enthusiastic about saving the High Line; before long, Friends of the High Line had become a chic cause within the art world. A benefit auction in the summer of 2001 at the Mary Boone Gallery in Chelsea brought in 400 guests, propelled the young organization into the society columns, and raised $200,000. The following year, Martha Stewart, whose offices are in the 1932 Starrett-Lehigh Building, a landmark of modern industrial architecture occupying a full block just north of the Chelsea Market, cohosted a benefit with the actor Edward Norton. In 2004 the clothing designer Diane von Furstenberg opened her West Village studio for a cocktail party preceding a benefit held at Phillips de Pury & Company. Two years later, the proceeds from the summer benefit—a dinner held at Cipriani Wall Street—hit the million-dollar mark.

But more than money was needed. All politics in New York is, in the end, community politics: to hold sway, elected officials and organizations must have grassroots support. David, who is a populist by nature, was bent on rallying the residents of the housing projects, brownstones, and tenements in the surrounding neighborhood. The High Line was, after all, intended to be a public park in a part of the city that had a very low ratio of green space relative to its population. With singular dedication, he put his personal life on hold and spent all his available time attending and organizing meetings with neighborhood block associations and getting members of the community to turn out for public hearings. It soon became apparent that he would have to give up his work as a travel writer and make Friends of the High Line his full-time career. As he immersed himself ever more deeply in promoting the park, he realized that getting appointed a member of Community Board 4 would give the Friends additional leverage. Serving on the board meant tending to numerous important, if not directly related, items of business, such as affordable housing and rezoning. His most important rewards were mastering the art of consensus-building and developing an intimate understanding of the issues that concerned his neighbors. For David the notion of the High Line as a park where all the diverse segments of the community could come together was an even more compelling vision than its potential as a unique urban planning opportunity.

Hammond, on the other hand, was committed to the idea that the new High Line should make a major design statement; he envisioned something outside the ordinary park paradigm. Like David, he found it necessary to give up his previous work in order to devote himself entirely to this end. In 2003 he decided to have what he calls an international, open-ideas competition, for which he assembled a jury of three well-known architects and two landscape architects. They ended up picking four winners from among 720 entries sent from 38 countries. Since ideas were being solicited instead of actual planning proposals, whimsy was not in short supply. One winner, Nathalie Rinne of Vienna, proposed a 7,920-foot-long swimming pool. Among the other ideas submitted were a fluorescent funhouse, a log-flume ride, a trellis-wrapped garden, a roller coaster, a mini–Appalachian Trail, and a landscape representing the three spheres of Dante’s Divine Comedy: Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. Hammond rented exhibition space at Grand Central Terminal at a nonprofit rate and mounted a show of the winning schemes. To catch the attention of passersby, there was a continuous video presentation of brief clips in which project supporters praised the most important idea of all: turning the High Line into a park. In this context, the notion of converting a piece of starkly industrial architecture—and an elevated one, to boot—into a public green space no longer seemed particularly far-fetched.

If the ideas competition was chiefly for publicity, the international design competition announced in March 2004 was for real. Of course it generated its own considerable publicity, especially since the finalists included such international figures as the architect Zaha Hadid and the artist James Turrell. Hammond was delighted when the jury picked his first choice, the landscape architect James Corner, founder of the firm James Corner Field Operations.

When I went to see Corner, he explained, “My approach is always to let the site speak. I have to ask myself what is it that design may kill or destroy and how to design so that we not only preserve but grow and amplify existing potentials.” Not surprisingly, his reaction was not unlike that of Hammond and David when they first saw the High Line at grade and not from below:

I was really overwhelmed when I first stepped on the High Line and saw a thicket of trees growing there. Then I grew aware of the quietness of the place and of the magnificent vistas and views. I was very impressed with the way in which a structure of steel and concrete and ballast was being colonized by nature. You could see how the rotting wood of the decaying railroad ties was creating soil in which seeds blown by the wind or dropped by birds could germinate. The question became how to amplify this mysterious dichotomy between nature and the city by giving one a profound sense of being part of the urban fabric and yet divorced from it in some special way.

The High Line promenade

Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, principals in the architectural firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, were Corner’s collaborators, along with Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf, who is known for naturalistic plantings of grasses and perennials, which he arranges in meadowlike drifts. Both hardscape and landscape elements were integrated by the design team in such a manner as to reinforce the visitor’s sense of the High Line as a place with a past as well as a present and the fact that the park is indeed, as its name implies, linear. Corner explained:

We made the paving planks open up and split apart to form a parallel series of linear planting beds, contained by bands made of the same concrete aggregate as the promenade planking. In size, color, and texture, the stones within the aggregate resemble the ballast between the original ties of the railroad tracks. The volcanic gravel mulch in the planting beds also matches the original ballast. Irrigation of the planting beds was solved by canting the subsurface concrete platform for the promenade paving to allow water that falls into the joints of the planks to drain into the beds. The small amount of water that is not absorbed then flows into drains at the edges of the promenade where it is captured and recycled. As a final design refinement, pieces of track were left in place and incorporated into the paving, a ghostly memory of the High Line’s former function.

Just Two Guys with a Logo

When an innovative design succeeds as well as the High Line’s has, there is a sense of inevitability about it. But to realize a vision, particularly one as unconventional as the conversion of a rusting elevated rail spur into a park, takes political acumen, good leadership, management skills, creative fund-raising, and no small amount of luck. While everyone now takes the presence of the High Line for granted, people still ask, “How did those two guys do it?”

With his unerring instinct for the right kind of publicity, Hammond approached Terence Riley, then chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, about the possibility of mounting an exhibition of the plan for the future High Line. To his surprise, Riley immediately agreed to exhibit the winning entry of the Field Operations team for three months. The exhibition opened in April 2005 and proved to be so popular that the museum extended its three-month run until October 31. This was a key moment, Hammond recalls, when “people’s expectations changed and things really started to move forward.”

As important as the buzz generated by the exhibition, which would help the Friends raise the $4.4 million in private funds that they would contribute to the construction of the first segment of the High Line, was obtaining the necessary government approvals and core financial support, without which the project would stall. This involved a good deal of grunt work long before and after the exhibition took place. By a stroke of good luck, Gifford Miller, a college friend of Hammond’s, was the head of the City Council at the time, and he and fellow council member Christine Quinn scheduled a hearing in July 2001. David says, “We had to get everyone we could possibly get to be there. I worked on that for a month. All I did was call people, get them to promise to come or to give me letters to bring if they weren’t coming. We got letters from all the important galleries, all of the important block associations. They made a big thump when I laid them down on the table.”

Emerging victorious from the hearing, they still needed the City Council’s financial support. Through Miller’s leadership, $15.75 million for the project was voted into the council’s capital budget. Then in 2004, City Hall announced a $43.25 million appropriation in the mayoral budget. It appeared that only five years after David and Hammond had formed Friends of the High Line, their seemingly impossible dream had become a real project in the minds of both the public and the municipal government.

There was yet another hurdle to overcome: obtaining a Certificate of Interim Trail Use from the federal Surface Transportation Board. Under the terms of a congressional program called Rails to Trails, the railroad could donate the High Line to the city for use as temporary linear parkland. (Since it is unlikely that railroad companies will reactivate their service on currently unused lines, “interim trail use” is a concept that is practically always honored in the breach.) At last, on April 11, 2006, Mayor Bloomberg, Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff, New York senators Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer, and philanthropists Diane von Furstenberg and her husband, media executive Barry Diller, smiled for the camera at what would usually be called a groundbreaking; there was, of course, no actual ground to break in this case: only tracks, ballast, and debris to be removed. Now that construction of the first phase, referred to as section 1, was certain, Friends of the High Line began to negotiate a license agreement with the city, which would allow the group authority over the day-to-day operations of the High Line when it became a public park. Within city government, Amanda Burden, chairman of the New York City Planning Commission, and a strong proponent of the project from the beginning, was given the job by the mayor of acting as client representative. Her eye for design detail, honed when she earlier oversaw the construction of the Battery Park City esplanade, made her an active participant in many day-to-day on-site decisions.

I first walked the High Line with Hammond in 2001 when the tracks were still covered with the same grasses and wildflowers one sees in Sternfeld’s photographs. And although I had been interested in the project from the time when it was, in his words, “just two guys with a logo,” I secretly harbored reservations about how it would turn out. Wasn’t the small miracle of spontaneous revegetation in the most starkly industrial kind of landscape a humbling reminder of nature’s enduring fecundity, something precious that would be lost? Like Hammond, David, and Corner, I wanted other New Yorkers to experience the magical views of the city from this unusual perspective, but at the same time, I feared that even the meticulous minimalism of Corner’s design would destroy the kind of beauty that provided so much of the High Line’s mysterious attraction.

My walk on the new High Line in the fall of 2009, shortly after section 1, the stretch that runs from Gansevoort to Twentieth Street, opened to the public, was a revelation. I was pleased to see how the remnant tracks, paving planks, and slim, backless wood benches pay homage to the fact that the High Line is still really a line. Its flow is reinforced by the planting beds, which are defined by raised bands approximately the same width as the old railroad tracks. The plants growing in the narrow strips of soil in between have an air of spontaneity that evokes the vegetation that was there before. The contained bed built to accommodate the roots of the grove of birches next to Gansevoort Overlook has been given thin walls of COR-TEN steel, whose rust color harks back to the defunct trestle’s decaying beams.

The High Line, section 1, looking south, planting by Piet Oudolf

Cityscape view from section 1, the High Line

As Corner’s “scripted” design-as-choreography envisioned, the High Line’s intensely urban context is dramatized. Visible along the edges are a number of billboards oriented toward the drivers below. Their eye-catching, high-end advertisements constitute part of the design’s borrowed scenery, making the visitor aware that the High Line is first and foremost an urban walkway separated from, but part of, the ever-changing city.

The wide passage running through what was once the second floor of a warehouse—now the Chelsea Market—where freight trains formerly stopped next to loading docks, is a “gallery” for public art. The permanent installation within this space is Spencer Finch’s The River That Flows Both Ways, 700 individually crafted panels of colored glass in shifting, camera-captured, aquatic tonalities, depicting, image by image, the way in which the tidal exchange of water in the Hudson over a single day makes the current reverse direction. Friends of the High Line also seeks to exhibit temporary artworks. Working in collaboration with the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation, the organization has commissioned several site-specific pieces. Installed at various locations along the length of the High Line, they appear as casual rather than intrusive landscape interventions.

The High Line’s most significant artwork, however, is not that of a sculptor, painter, or conceptual artist; rather it is found in the color, texture, composition, and scale of Piet Oudolf’s continually transforming, four-seasons plant tapestry. This is where many visitors focus their cameras as they notice the subtle alterations in planting motifs and thematic contrast as each segment of the promenade merges with the next. When I walked with Oudolf one day on the High Line, I learned why his collaboration with Corner had turned out to be so successful. Explaining how he incorporated the landscape architect’s fundamental design narrative into a vegetal narrative of his own, Oudolf said,

The High Line really changed my style. More and more, ecology is part of my design approach. But not entirely. Ecosystems can be beautiful but not necessarily so. My approach is a design one; the plants have to have complexity and depth. They must make a picture. You have to have coherence within a free-flowing design. Ecology and aesthetics have to combine. Jim wanted me to translate his narrative into my own terms; to do this, I had to have a conceptual narrative too.

Oudolf’s narrative can be said to be Neo-Romantic. It harks back to the same kind of wildness and mystery I experienced when I saw the High Line’s overgrown roadbed for the first time. Oudolf claims, “I wanted to make my design both sensory and poetic, with an element of memory. People should feel something about this place in time.”

When I inquired how Oudolf was able to orchestrate his planting plan so as to achieve what he calls thematic matrices—individual yet blended segments of the High Line landscape in which a series of dominant plant species, grasses as a rule, are used as a background medium for an amazingly varied vegetative palette—he replied, “Jim’s narrative really helped me to create my own plant narrative within it. He has an ecological approach, and I liked that. On his plan for the High Line there were places he had designated as woodland or wetland or grassland. I knew what I had to do.”

He went on to explain to me how he is able to achieve the effect of a landscape in which plants seem to come up spontaneously:

I think of the High Line and my other work, too, as four-dimensional design. Time and seasonality are critical factors. Plants grow, change, and die. They also seed themselves. You therefore have to think about succession—what will come up spontaneously and how that will appear within the context of what is already there. That is the dimension of time: thinking about how things are going to look next year and the year after that, knowing some of the rules of nature even though nature is often an unpredictable partner. You also have to think about seasonality—of what things are going to look like at different times of the year. I think it’s beautiful when plants go to seed. Perennials don’t need to be deadheaded. Coneflowers, astilbes, and echinaceas look great when their flower heads turn brown, and I like the way grasses get tall at the end of summer, with plumelike seed heads that wave in the breeze.

Fortunately, from the time the first plantings were installed up to the present, the High Line’s horticultural staff have taken their maintenance cues from Oudolf’s original scheme. The current director of horticulture, Thomas Smarr, has a keen appreciation of the unique landscape that became his responsibility, and it is clear that, while relying on his own day-to-day decisions as a trained botanical garden director, he has wholeheartedly bought into Piet Oudolf’s aesthetic. “This is challenging plant material,” he told me. “It is important that Piet stays involved, because this type of landscape is about changing ideas. I am fortunate to be in an ongoing dialogue with the place and also the designer.”

The Home Stretch

The last segment of the High Line—section 3—was in construction when I called on Corner in his large, light-filled Tenth Avenue office looking out at the sweep of the Hudson River and down toward the High Line’s northern terminus at Thirty-Fourth Street. I asked him whether he thought the intense redevelopment of the Hudson Yards would cause the High Line to become overcrowded with an excess of visitors coming from the adjacent high-rise buildings. His reply was positive:

There is such a frenzy of new construction taking place in the Hudson Yards, and this is going to produce thousands of nearby residents. This is something we have had to consider in our design. Also, we have had to take into account the fact that here we have an entirely different set of parameters than in section 1 and section 2. There are fewer existing assets you can leverage and fewer of the kind of adjacencies you have in Chelsea and the meatpacking district, where we had a lot of bricolage—balconies, fire stairs, bricks, collections of ad hoc stuff—to play off of. Section 3 is where the High Line is no longer parallel to Tenth Avenue but turns west and then runs north along Twelfth. Because it traverses the Hudson Yards, it is much more open visually. It has assets such as beautiful sunsets over the river and views of the Palisades, but the scale and surrounding urban scenery are entirely different. We call the place where section 3 begins at Thirtieth Street the Crossroads.

Explaining how the design negotiates this nexus of change, Corner continued, “This is a major entrance where people will be deciding in which direction they are going to walk: up to the Hudson Yards Plaza, which is a few feet above the High Line; south into section 2; west as they enter section 3; or along the spur that once delivered mail to the old Farley Post Office on Eighth Avenue across from Penn Station. Since we are anticipating congestion at this point, there will be an extended platform space with wooden stair-step seating.”

On a beautiful Sunday a few months after the opening of section 3 I took a walk on the High Line. The weather and the fact that it was the weekend naturally brought out a large number of visitors, but a mood of pleasurable tranquillity was evident in the way people moved at a promenade pace or sat in quiet groups on benches. Just as Corner had suggested, the experience altered after I made the turn west where the tracks veer toward Twelfth Avenue. Although still confined by the High Line’s steel side panels and moving along a directional corridor, I was now walking across a spacious platform with an exhilarating breadth of view in all directions. Here I could feel the breeze blowing off the Hudson and see the highway, bikeway, and Hudson River Park below being used by others who were enjoying the same kind of experience of scenery in motion as those of us who were walking the High Line. Tall cranes in the Hudson Yards signaled the growth of a dynamic district that is part of the new New York, a city where old skyscrapers are now being dwarfed by others built according to a revised building scale. At the same time, the place felt intimate and sociable wherever there were people gathered in clusters on the commodious benches found at intervals along the way.

An especially imaginative feature: a portion of the planking has been cut away to expose the beams beneath, making it possible for people to see the High Line as a piece of industrial infrastructure. More than an engineering lesson, however, these girders, which have been coated with a rubberized material, constitute a novel kind of playground.

An even more imaginative design move was the decision to allow the final stretch of the High Line to sink back into history. Where the tracks, which run parallel to Twelfth Avenue in the last segment of section 3, swing back toward the east, horticulture bows out and serendipitous vegetation growing amid the old rails and rotting ties makes an evocative final appearance of pre-park wildness. Skirted by a walk of stabilized ballast rather than the familiar concrete aggregate planking that defines the rest of the High Line, this piece of industrial poetics is a lesson in nature’s own dynamic, a continually evolving tapestry of plant life subject to forces of unending change.

Section 3 of the High Line, looking north beyond the Hudson Yards

The High Line, exposed rubberized girders as a play feature

The High Line, remnant of original tracks

It was a still fall night when I last walked the High Line. As I passed along the softly illuminated planting beds, surrounded by the lights of the sparkling city and the sweep of the Hudson River, my thoughts turned to the multifaceted, incomprehensible marvel that is New York. Pausing beside the grove of birches next to the Gansevoort Overlook, I was searching for words to express the emotion I felt. Then I recalled a passage from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby:

As the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees…had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

But then I drew back from this reverie to ponder whether the New York cityscape at which I gazed wasn’t also a marvel, one that would have been even more astonishing than the densely vegetated island to the eyes of Dutch sailors. And wasn’t the recovery of this forgotten industrial scrap of it four hundred years later something commensurate with our own capacity for wonder at the endurance of both nature and human aspiration?