New Yorks High Line: Why the floating promenade is so popular

NEW YORK On Manhattans Far West Side, they built an elevated railroad in the 1930s because freight trains and pedestrians kept colliding down on 10th Avenue. The trains won.

On the High Line today, the locomotives are long gone, and the pedestrians have emerged the victors. Seven days a week, a shifting throng simultaneously observes and forms its own pageant. By 10 a.m., the early joggers, commuters and yoga students have melted away before the arrival of the walkers, heading up through Chelsea or down to the Meatpacking District. They stop like currents in an eddy for a while, or they find a grassy backwater, but mostly they go with the flow. The polyglot visitors find a trendy destination, the natives a transcendental sidewalk that stretches a mile and a half, now that the third and last segment opened this fall.

The path narrows to just a few feet for much of its course, yet almost 5 million visitors pass one another every year in relaxed good cheer. Just five years after opening, the High Line has become one of the top visitor attractions in New York more popular even than the Statue of Liberty and an emblem of the reversal in the historical decline of the American city in general and Gotham in particular.

It has become an archetype for cities everywhere craving their own High Line mojo. In Washington, it is the inspiration for a proposed elevated park where the old 11th Street Bridge crossed the Anacostia River and, separately, for a component in the long-range redevelopment of Union Station.

The reasons for its broad appeal are both tangible and elusive but reduce to this: The High Line serves up the Big Apple on a platter 30 feet high. Look eastward, and you can savor the view of Midtowns iconic skyscrapers. Look west, and the Hudson River lolls by, black and sparkling in the autumn light. The High Line takes you, voyeuristically, past the windows of high-rise offices and apartments and, increasingly, close to the swanky condos rising around it. You can look down to the bistros of the once-gritty Meatpacking District, or the leafy cross streets of West Chelsea, or the ribbons of silver commuter cars in the Hudson Rail Yards.

For all the attention-grabbing vistas, the focus eventually settles on the parks interior character. It is a runway where people go to see and to be seen, like a return to the 19th-century promenade synonymously a place and an act, where generations past put on their Sunday best and headed to the park, not to walk but to strut.

And while the High Line propels movement, that doesnt necessarily mean getting from here to there, said Chris Reed, a landscape architect who teaches at Harvards Graduate School of Design and who takes students to the High Line. The act of the promenade is something we lost in the 20th century, and a project like this allows us to focus on just that, the experience of movement.

The idea of reusing old transportation corridors is not new in Washington, the C&O Canal, and the Capital Crescent and W&OD trails, are obvious examples of such reincarnations. But the High Lines success has been so swift that its success appears in hindsight to have been preordained. This would be a misread.

From rail cars to wildflowers

After the last train squealed its way along the tracks in 1980, the High Line became just another peeling grave marker to old, working New York. In time, the rails took on a mantle of rust, and the rotting ties and track ballast turned into a growing medium for weeds. Some of the weeds took the form of pretty wildflowers goldenrod, milkweed and Queen Annes lace; some were thuggish trees and vines. Together, though, they imprinted the idea of vegetation turning the High Line into a garden, however feral, apart from the city.

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New Yorks High Line: Why the floating promenade is so popular