Forgotten Spaces: Manhattan’s Hidden Garden

The last train to trundle through Manhattan’s West Side on the High Line bore a modest cargo. Frozen turkeys, three carloads of them, made their frosty way along the elevated rail route to their appointed end in the city’s meatpacking district.

That was in 1980. The High Line then fell dormant, less a conduit for turkeys than a bed for seedlings. Flowers, weeds, and saplings burst up about the dank steel. Drains clogged, leaving storm water rivulets to meander between the rail ties, and birds nested in the rusty shade. Now the High Line is on the verge of conversion to park space, forcing planners to determine whether it should be cultivated and opened to the public or closed off to protect the native plant life that has flourished in the cracks industry left behind.

Construction of the High Line began under the West Side Improvement project soon after the onset of the Depression, signaling the muscled development projects of the New Deal that would soon follow. Elevated two stories above street level, the line was designed to alleviate congestion and accidents along Tenth Avenue, known as “Death Avenue” for its fatal confluence of pedestrians, trains, and automobiles. The line’s operator, the New York Central Railroad Company, delivered nearly half of the city’s cream and milk, much of it along the High Line. It is thus doubly fitting that when finished in 1934, the High Line was touted as the “Life Line of New York.”

But the High Line began limping toward obsolescence by the 1950s. The compact Mack truck provided a more flexible and efficient method for delivering goods to Manhattan buildings. In the 1960s, the southern chunk of the line was destroyed. In 1993 another stretch was torn down.

The last spur of the High Line, a 1.5-mile stretch that wends through Manhattan’s artsy Chelsea district, was set to be dismantled in 2001. Thirty feet off the ground, ranging in width from 25 to 40 feet, it runs primarily along Tenth Avenue from 34th Street south to Gansevoort Street. Complaints from local property owners that the line cast a gloomy shadow throughout the neighborhood, combined with the prohibitively expensive maintenance costs born by CSX, the Richmond-based rail company that owns the structure, sounded the death knell of the High Line.

But in an urban irony befitting New York, the High Line’s very dereliction seems to have saved it. Now grassed over, it has suddenly become relevant to a city preoccupied with developing parks. The High Line has its own wild ecosystem framed by old industrial warehouses-and its green and grimy allure seems not wholly unrelated to the chic value of the pricey lofts and galleries that now inhabit those warehouses. Purple aster, Queen Anne’s lace, ailanthus trees, apple tree saplings, and Black-eyed Susans are a sample of the flora that have taken root-alongside littered broken bottles and trash-atop the abandoned rail bed. The space may become a model for a new breed of urban park reclaimed from industrial use.

A neighborhood group, Friends of the High Line (FHL), was formed in 1999 to save the line from destruction. In keeping with its Chelsea digs, the group enlisted a fashionable and politically connected cadre to stave off challenges from developers and local businesses. The High Line has quickly become a cause celebre that counts actor Edward Norton and fashion designers Todd Oldham and Diane von Furstenberg among its supporters. The growing efforts of the group have met with some success: in a series of court skirmishes last year, FHL successfully halted demolition plans negotiated during the Giuliani administration.

An opposing group, known as the Chelsea Property Owners, has argued that the Line, which once accelerated industrial development, has now choked it. Douglas Sarini, who heads the group, has said that his company, Edison Parking Corporation, has had to turn away offers to purchase its site beneath the High Line for manufacturing development and a new movie studio. “Money doesn’t grow on trees. And the last time we checked, it wasn’t growing in the weeds of the High Line, either,” reads one flyer distributed by the group. 

But FHL counters that the High Line could be an economic boon for the city. A nearby park would boost property values, which would, in turn, generate new tax revenues. In December 2002, the city-now under the reign of a new mayor who has championed the project-announced its agreement with FHL. In filing a claim with the federal Surface Transportation Board, the city requested that the High Line be granted a Certificate of Interim Trail Use. If the claim is successful, the space will be eligible for a process called “rail-banking,” which allows inactive rail corridors to be reused as recreational trails.

Estimates for the cost of converting the High Line to a park run as high as $65 million. But last July, the New York City Council announced a plan to devote $15.75 million over the next three years to revitalize the High Line. Presumably it did not hurt that Gifford Miller, the speaker of the Council, was a college roommate of Robert Hammond, one of the founders of FHL.

“We believe we can turn this space into one of New York’s great places,” Deputy Mayor Daniel L. Doctoroff told The New York Times in July. “This is the spine, truly the vital link, that connects three rapidly evolving and exciting neighborhoods.”

Joshua David, the other founder of FHL, says his organization is now poised to take control of the line and prepare it for public access.

But determining the best use for the High Line may be more of a challenge than saving it. David notes that two camps have developed. One wants to make it as accessible as possible for the public; the other is clamoring to preserve the space as if it were a precious wetland. While the High Line affords a lovely and unusual view that juxtaposes the Hudson River and an industrial landscape, it also shelters a scraggly, fragile ecosystem, valuable because it has developed untouched.

Joel Sternfeld, a photographer who has published a book about the High Line, compared it with New York’s most famous open space while touring the site with a reporter from The Independent. “Central Park is really cosmetic in many ways. [The High Line] is a true time landscape, a railroad ruin. The abandoned place is the place where seasonality resides… This is what spring in New York actually looks like when it’s left up to spring.”

Maintaining that “true time landscape” and, at the same time, encouraging public access is the challenge that now falls to High Line planners.

“There’s no way to keep it pristine and have people up there,” says David.

How the High Line debate plays out may instruct other cities in how to reclaim disused urban structures as active park space. This past summer saw a design competition, featuring work from more than 700 architects from nearly 40 countries. The non-binding competition held out contradictory trophies: one award to the architect who imagined the most accessible space and another to the architect who best preserved the natural flora.

“In order to keep that as a sublime space and yet to enable it to become a public park, you have to do quite a lot,” says Laura Pollak, winner of the prize for site preservation. The goal, she said, is to make the space both natural and social. In their design, Pollak and her team employed raised paths to allow public access but limit trampling. Their vision also calls for a flatbed rail car to serve as a community garden and an “opportunistic landscape” that favors forest succession.

The High Line’s likely conversion is not without precedent. FHL points to Paris’ La Promenade PlantŽe . Located in the 12th arrondissement, in a formerly seedy part of town, the 1.5-mile promenade stands on the site of an elevated rail line that operated from 1852 to 1969. The promenade-built between 1988 and 1998-cost $187 million. The investment seems to have paid off with a local development boom: its street level archways, which once sheltered trash bins, now house the shops of artisans. In another example, Seattle opened Gas Works Park, designed by Richard Haag, in 1973. The nineteen-acre space includes many of the leftover structures from the Washington Natural Gas Company’s coal gasification plant, which had closed in 1956 after half a century of operation.

These two sites both follow the model of providing maximum public access. The concern for natural preservation makes the issue of access to a reclaimed space like the High Line more complex.

Some among the competition organizers hold out hope that a design might balance the impulse to preserve a site’s ecology with the wish to exhibit its natural growth to the public. The reclamation of the High Line should not aim to segregate humans from nature, says Robert Breunig, director of the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, which sponsored the preservation prize at the design competition. “The High Line probably could support a strict ecological restoration project, but its design can respect the natural world as much as it does the built environment… [The High Line] reflects the healing of a landscape that was there before the city was there.”

It may seem odd that so many people take the overgrowth along the High Line as a serious natural phenomenon. But its wild park stands as a refreshing counterpoint in a city for which planning and development is a sort of obsessive-compulsive behavior. It is a truer park, in a way, than the city’s signature green space, Central Park, which has been carefully rusticated in a bid at planned disorder.

And in a wider sense, the High Line is novel because it not only evaded redevelopment but was forgotten altogether. The superheated real estate market of Manhattan now has parallels in Chicago, where mixed-use skyscrapers are replacing abandoned industrial land on the fringes of The Loop, in Washington, where vast downtown parking lots are subject to massive bidding wars, and in other cities. In the coming years, left-behind spaces in those cities may also become celebrated for their quiet survival. Those cities may look to the High Line as a valuable guide in preserving odd survivors of real estate competition.

As government agencies close in on a deal to save the High Line, at least one of the grand prize-winning designs has drowned the debate. An Austrian architect laid out her plans to convert the High Line into a mile-long swimming pool. Call it precious blue space.