Joel Sternfeld, Looking South on an Afternoon in June, 2000. Digital C-print; 39 1/2 x 50 in. (100.33 x 127 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.
If a pot of wisdom is broken, it could mean wisdom will spill out of the world or, on the contrary, it could mean it will permeate every nook and corner and be accessible to everyone.
—EL ANATSUI1
Once we reached a certain height we could see it. Until then the path—high, strong, hidden, and burnished with the patina of use—was nearly lost. Honoring or preserving it at first seemed unthinkable, and then inevitable. The mile-and-a-half-long track had long cut a swath largely above Tenth Avenue, the gills of Manhattan Island’s Lower West Side, and looked as if it would never be much more than what it was—an engineering feat built nearly a century ago to haul meats, dairy, and produce. The city demolished parts of the viaduct in the 1960s, and shut it down completely in 1980, but it remained alive as a fantasy repurposing project for architects for decades, a kind of Holy Grail, while a succession of mayoral administrations had tried to scrap it.2 Pedestrians in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood would often scurry under the aging tracks with accumulated debris and grime to avoid being bombed with droppings, while at night on the tracks above there were rumored to be raves.3 How to scale and enter the risen path was largely unknown. It all might begin in darkness, but it cast a shadow that, when viewed from the ground, was too bleak. Demolition was once a question not of “whether, but when,” until one photographer spent a year on the trail documenting what was there.4
The scenes were “hallucinatory”—wildflowers, Queen Anne’s lace, irises, and grasses wafted next to hardwood ailanthus trees that bolted up from the soil on railroad tracks, on which rust had accumulated over the decades.5 Steel played willing host to an exuberant, spontaneous garden that showed fealty to its unusual roots. Tulips shared the soilbed with a single pine tree outfitted with lights for the winter holidays, planted outside of a building window that opened onto the iron-bottomed greenway with views of the Hudson River and the Statue of Liberty to the left and traffic, buildings, and Tenth Avenue to the right.6 Wading through waist-high Queen Anne’s lace was like seeing “another world right in the middle of Manhattan.”7 The scene was a kind of wildering, the German idea of ortsbewüstung, an ongoing sense of nature reclaiming its ground.8
“You think of hidden things as small. That is how they stay hidden. But this hidden thing was huge. A huge space in New York City that had somehow escaped everybody’s notice,” said Joshua David, who cofounded a nonprofit organization with Robert Hammonds to save the railroad.9
They called it the High Line.
“It was beautiful refuse, which is kind of a scary thing because you find yourself looking forward and looking backwards at the same time,” architect Liz Diller told me in our conversation about the conversion of the tracks into a public space, done in a partnership with her architectural firm, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and James Corner, Principal of Field Operations, and Dutch planting designer Piet Oudolf. Other architectural plans proposed turning the High Line into a “Street in the Air” with biking, art galleries, and restaurants, but their team “saw that the ruinous state was really alive.”
Joel Sternfeld, the “poet-keeper” of the walkway, put the High Line’s resonance best: “It’s more of a path than a park. And more of a Path than a path.”10
Joel Sternfeld, Looking South on an Afternoon in June, 2000. Digital C-print; 39 1/2 x 50 in. (100.33 x 127 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.
From a certain elevation, with the benefit of a view of the ground and into the distance, we see how a rise often starts on a outworn, maligned foundation; the threshing floor of our endeavors becomes a kind of consecrated ground.11 It has the authenticity of a careworn luster that comes with use. We hear more about dignity and “pensive luster” from cultures where the patina of age is highly valued, from the shutaku (soil from handling) in Chinese culture or the Japanese concept of nare that garners a reverence over “shallow brilliance,” objects with too much finish.12 In France, low radiance, the mere shine off a coin, was once enough to mark the start and end of the workday in winter, it was “the moment when there was not enough light to distinguish a denier [a small coin] of Tours from a denier of Paris.”13 The light that begins and ends these uncommon journeys requires a similar sensitivity to their sheen.
It often takes a blaze to see things anew. So age upon age has had its icons who went unsung during their lifetime. When Herman Melville died as a customs agent at the Port of New York in 1891, his widow complained that the copyright of White Jacket (1850) and Moby-Dick (1851) had no worth; they “give no income and have no market value.”14 It took nearly seventy years for Moby-Dick to receive its critical acclaim. In the final months of writing the book, Melville suspected as much, and acrimoniously foretold his fate: “though I wrote the Gospels in this century, I should die in the gutter.”15 Our lodestars often shine a few foot-candles below the level we are prepared to see.
A rise often falls into the blind spot of vision, and so we tell the stories that I have in this book because we are hardwired not to be able to glimpse them. Like a type II error in statistics, a “false negative,” when we have the evidence but can’t see that an alternative hypothesis is correct, these rises are a perceptual miss. We tell the story of Muhammad Ali’s eighth-round win against George Foreman that night in Kinshasa, Zaire, even though we know how it ends, for while it happened, no one could see it. Ali upset most of the 60,000-person crowd who favored him as he spent the first seven rounds, 180 seconds long each, learning against the ropes while enduring brutal frontal attacks from Foreman, known to have bored a hole in his practice punching bag. No amount of screaming from his trainers could get Ali off the ropes, never mind the shouting of those sitting near the ring, from George Plimpton to Norman Mailer—counting how many right-hand leads Ali took, and remembering how Ali, being pummeled, still managed to whisper to Foreman in the seventh round, “Is that all you got, George?”16 Yet no one but the fighters in the ring could sense it—there is a difference between being beaten and being strengthened, for as it happens, it is hard to perceive.
We extend the reach of these stories through repetition, as if to create the feeling of a Danish hygge, a word with no cognate in English that describes the feeling of sitting around a campfire in the cold with friends.
Entrepreneur Sara Blakely has often described the influence of her father’s unique way of asking about her activities when she was a young child; the lessons gleaned from his perspective became part of the foundation that helped her become one of the youngest self-made billionaires at age forty-one. Sitting at her family’s dining-room table at night meant hearing him constantly say, “What did you fail at today?” She and her brother disclosed their failed attempts at school activities like sports tryouts. After each one, he raved the way other parents might over a stellar report card.
“Blakely, you know you’re gonna change the world,” her closest friend, school teacher Laura Pooley, would often say, flopping onto a bed in their shared apartment. Blakely wanted to go to law school, but had twice done so poorly on the LSATs that she felt as if she had failed.17
“But I sell fax machines,” Blakely replied. Going door-to-door with office equipment was Blakely’s work for seven years.
“I know, but it’s your destiny,” Pooley said.
Blakely is the founder of the girdle-redefining line Spanx, valued at one billion dollars in 2011. She founded the company before the age of twenty-nine, and currently owns it outright. She is one of a handful of female billionaires who created wealth without a husband’s income or an inheritance.
She attributes the conversion, in large part, to her father’s childhood reconditioning about failure and its definition. Failure became not the outcome, but the refused attempt.
The equivalent of Blakely’s childhood dinner table conversations now exists as a conference called FailCon, a summit in Silicon Valley, which also takes place around the world from France to Australia, helping people “be wrong as fast as they can,” and speak publicly about how they did it.18 The rule there is that people can’t speak about their successes, only their failures.
“This is the only time that I’ve ever called someone to ask if I could speak at their conference in the last ten years,” said Vinod Khosla, founder and CEO of Sun Microsystems and Khosla Ventures, speaking to the audience gathered in the ballroom of the Hotel Kabuki in San Francisco in 2011. PayPal cofounder Max Levchin, Mark Pincus, founder of the social gaming company Zynga, Travis Kalanick, cofounder of Uber, and Kholsa are just a few of the speakers at this conference in the past few years, attended by tech entrepreneurs, investors, and founders.
I found a seat at the back of the hotel ballroom next to a slight man with blond hair and sun-weathered, tan skin who told me in a heavy Australian accent that he is a surfer, a harpsichord player, and also an entrepreneur. (He later told me that he had sold his company, astrology.com, with five million unique visitors to iVillage in 1994 for approximately $28 million.) He came to FailCon looking for a to-don’t list and to hear Khosla, who is fluent in failure. Khosla has thought about the many permutations of failure in entrepreneurship so much that his insights are either condensed quickly into pithy, insightful comments or are so deeply nuanced that they beg for clarification—and Kalanick, who stated that he was putting in his bid for “the unluckiest entrepreneur of the year” with his speech. After Kalanick’s synopsis about his ten-year-long slog, his astounding serial setbacks so heinous that if even one of the things he talked about had happened, it would be a failure, the post-lunch crowd, sluggish when he first stood on stage, was left rapt, pin-drop still, and few heads moved except to offer a sympathetic laugh.
“The problem is that when you do the fake-it-until-you-make-it strategy when you’re failing, it will crush you,” he said, then stopped, looked down, and said under his breath, partially caught by the microphone: “I said that so casually, so lightly, ‘it will crush you.’ Maybe I should sit down.” He sat down and the table crashed.
“Oh, okay, that just happened,” he said as if suddenly remembering that he is, in fact, in front of five-hundred people, sitting next to a falling table, and not alone, reflecting on a painful period in his life. “This is what I love about FailCon,” he said. “Whatever I do up here, it’s totally okay.”
Kalanick left time for questions but not for nearly as many as the almost fifty hands I counted that bolted up and stayed raised as he scanned the crowd. The first question was about his mental health and whom he was relying on for advice and mentorship.
“When you go this long, all the people who were giving you advice in the beginning start to think you are crazy,” Travis said. “So ultimately, by the time you get this far in, you don’t have anyone to talk to.
“Are there any other questions?”
The woman next to me leaned over. Despite writing about failure for years now, I had still needed the reminder of the dingy gleam of these rises, and I must have had a stunned look on my face. She touched my arm and whispered, “What’s the point of FailCon if we can’t talk about those things?”
Development aid organizations are also beginning to create spaces to process unintended outcomes with more transparency.
“If we all knew exactly what we were doing, we wouldn’t still be at it fifty years after we said we were going to solve the world’s problems,” Tim Brodhead told me from his office in Montreal when he was president and CEO of the J. W. McConnell Family Foundation in Canada, which since 1995 has specialized in funding difficult projects in the development sector.19 Success means something is wrong, Brodhead said. “It means that we’re either choosing very simple issues, or we’re deluding ourselves about our results.”
Brodhead was one of the earliest investors in Engineers Without Borders, Canada (EWB), an NGO based in Toronto, which recently dared to speak publicly about the organization’s setbacks in their development initiatives across sub-Saharan Africa. Years ago, EWB began to publish Failure Reports in addition to an Annual Report, pushing their level of acceptable disclosure beyond what many organizations would dare for fear of losing funding.
“The big organizations are driven by a need to raise donations. The dominant view is, well, the public won’t understand because we’ve made our pitch on the fact that if you give us a donation, then we’ll produce miracles. Well, everybody knows that’s not true. Everyone in the field of international development knows that’s not true.” The result, he says, is that development organization fund-raising appeals often simplify the message down to: “Give us the money, we’ll solve the problem. So if you say, ‘You gave us money but we haven’t been able to solve the problem,’ that’s a pretty dangerous thing to venture into.”
EWB Canada’s cofounders, George Roter and Parker Mitchell, along with Ashley Good, who runs an interactive web portal, Admitting Failure—a ground-clearing operation for other NGOs to disclose failures—were undaunted. As engineers, they had trained to understand systems analysis, the practice of predicting potential failure.20 They hold to a premise that we make breakthroughs in part because we are free enough to acknowledge when we have fallen short of our stated goals. The organization’s courageous self-criticality has been groundbreaking, one of the great catalytic moments in the field.
“After sixteen years of doing work in the NGO sector, I don’t know of anything that broaches this subject in the way that they have done it,” Samantha Nutt of War Child Canada told me about EWB’s initiative. “A lot of the time NGO groups will come together in cluster groups, and there you’ll have that dialogue, but never in this kind of big, cohesive, multifaceted way.”
Conversions are aided by a collective re-envisioning of what can come from alternate terrain. It was a West Side community board meeting that brought High Line cofounders Hammond and David together. Both were concerned about preventing the railroad’s demolition. They were the only ones. Everyone else at the meeting was “verging on apoplectic about the need to tear the whole thing down.”21 The tenor only became more aggrieved when they tried to preserve the “blight” that some thought would collapse any day.22
For a while, any materials about converting it into a route for all to enjoy went into a folder in the office of early supporter Christine Quinn called “Good Ideas That Will Never Happen,” who was then Speaker of the New York City Council. Yet Sternfeld’s images of the rusted, out-of-use tracks sparkling like the inside of a geode turned the landscape into a metaphor, an accurate view of how we live, one that had political force enough to transform public sentiment about the aerial path. Soon after, the paperwork started to outgrow the file.23
There is no word to describe exactly what the High Line is to the non-architects among us, nor the collective reframing process required to see beyond its dingy path.24 The promenade’s landscaping and minimal architectural interference is meant to find a balance between “melancholia and exuberance,” Diller told me. “Whatever that intermediate thing is, it’s ineffable and is kind of what makes the High Line so popular.”
“Part of what is so successful about the High Line is that it looks like it’s about nothing,” Diller said. Everything is prohibited on the promenade but the act of moving forward or stopping to look at the vistas from that vantage point. A dedicated place for strolling, where there are no dogs, no bicycles, or wheeled objects of any kind, it is “radically old fashioned,” designed to let us do what we ordinarily don’t, like taking time to linger and gaze at passing traffic. There is even a “sunken overlook” viewing station with movie-theater-style rows of descending seats and a window instead of a screen to see Tenth Avenue’s traffic instead of a featured film. Looking at the path beneath our feet and the view before us are the High Line’s activities.
The High Line’s path will extend up the island in nearly interminable stages, “perpetually unfinished.”25
As if to underscore it, on the west-facing side of the High Line, with views of the skyline and the Hudson River, sculptor Anatsui erected a monumental mural, Broken Bridge II, a three-dimensional painting the size of a city block made of flattened, dull-finish tin and mirrors with expert placement and hours of scaling. The vista in its upper reaches blends sky and land “in such a way that you do not know where mirrors end and sky begins.”26 Anatsui, known for his radiant, monumental murals with a unique luster, fashioned as they are out of recycled metal bottle caps from his studio in Nigeria, starts his work from an approximate center with exquisite discards. He then builds outward, unscrolling the once-scattered shards so that they shine in their new form, as if they could unfurl to the full extent of vision.
For me, walking the High Line has always felt like a land-bound immram, a passage tale where physical roads weave with new, imagined geographies without differentiating one from the other.27 It is an alternate bridge, offering entry, surrounded by the company of others, who walk, cavort, sit, or stroll around me, all enjoying previously inaccessible terrain.