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Walking the High Line in New York City.

The reconstruction of the High Line (an abandoned elevated railroad right of way on the west side of Manhattan, New York) has begun. It, or at least part of it, will become a thin lineal park. It will be turned into a cultivated place, reclaimed from the natural form into which it had floated. In this post I share my notes on my visit to it with a Brooklyn friend when it was still an adventure into an urban wilderness.

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The television window occasionally beckons us out to an adventure. I got the call unexpectedly, from a screen image named Joel Sternfeld. The High Line, he said, showing his photographs of what I had thought an inaccessible place atop the elevated structure on the far West Side of Manhattan. Beautiful, he said, nature reclaiming an abandoned man-made structure. Massive. Thirty feet in the air, track and roadbed not visible from street level below, but open to the sky and the elements. At the city’s edge, silent and still, yet with the hint of Jack London’s “Call of the Wild,” stirring up a feral urge.

I know that place, I thought. I had rented a mini-storage space in a building facing north at 17th Street near 11th Avenue. Down the block to the East at 10th Avenue I repeatedly encountered this High Line, nameless to me then. More solid and squat than other elevated tracks of memory. I encountered it repeatedly, always having it register in my consciousness but invariably shaking the image off. This big overhead thing, in a way there but gone. Part of the negative space. Among the places I know but have not permitted myself to possess.

And there is the picture of Joel Sternfeld taking pictures, breaking into this ignored space. Making it subject. The shadow has substance. I can go there. I can do that.

Access? Shimmy up a leg? Assemble a long ladder on site? Not Joel’s style. He’s a middle aged man with heavy and bulky photographic equipment. He has the dignity of a Harvard professor. He probably had an entourage for his foray.

To the Web. Find that others have preceded and followed him and have reported back. There it is, access at 33rd Street at grade. And a metal, staged, zig-zag stair at 17th Street that in fact is broken and leads into a cage within a restricted parking lot.

Also learned there is a history and a politics. Early in the 20th Century a railroad artery runs down the far West Side at grade level and encounters cross-town traffic to and from the piers. Considerable confusion. Fatal accidents. And there is an economic depression. Resolution by finesse: Levitating the tracks and the parallel auto route, the much more famous West Side Highway, in time for the decline of the piers, (the transatlantic liners giving way to the airplane); and the decline of the railroads, (replaced by interstate highways and large trailer trucks), all pushed along by a crime dominated waterfront. In a short 44 years the project reaches bottom. The last train delivery goes down the High Line in 1980. The slow physical collapse of the West Side Highway follows. It is now in process of de- and reconstruction. But the High Line, monumental and isolated, remains.

Uptown around the 50s this line had descended into a twenty foot below grade ditch—unused and overgrown with weeds like the other down town remnant, but still undiscovered, or really unattended.

Mayor G. of recent memory. His self-righteous style, in your face, sucking up all the air as has been said. You only approve his schemes when you agree 100%. Otherwise you resist. It’s the dialectic in operation. Street-crime yes; Jesus in Ethiopia no; pull down the High Line…? Hold on Pal, let’s talk this over.

Late in his administration Mayor G opts for the knock down, supporting the property interests located below and around. The opposition forms, Friends of the High Line, architects and traditionalists, demanding retention of the shell, its interior to be converted to a preview of paradise, a hanging garden by the Hudson. There is a third group, invisible until now, who take a Teddy Roosevelt “Hands Off” approach. Let it be. Let it mellow. I incline toward the Teddies.

To know of it is to want to tramp it. An unattainable moonscape in your face and now suddenly accessible. One step for man and all that and it can be your step. I want it.

First an external survey. I walk south from 14th Street and 10th Avenue. The High Line continues down for another three blocks and abruptly ends, or begins, by the intersection of Washington and Gansevoort Streets. A tear like in the pulled down facade of a tenement that leaves the entrails visible. An unhappy look except that an aluminum pipe construct of a person is sitting astride the middle bar of the fence overseeing the street. He has sparse thin curly wire hair. I don’t mark him from the street below, although my camera does, but I am to meet him and make his acquaintance later. This stick man looks south and east from the border of the now squeezed meat packing district, looks to the encroaching yuppie housing and restaurants. I turn around and head north.

An immediately noticed characteristics of the High Line: It does not barrel down the roadway of the street like the elevated subway lines in the outer boroughs. It is not an upper level casting a dark shadow on the life below. It crosses streets and runs up the center of blocks, playing hide and seek among the buildings that offer it camouflage. It is an overpowering presence to the traffic below at only three points. Around 17th Street and around 31st Street and at 14th Street where it directly meets West Street. It bulks up, is broader and heavier and pushes at the large destination buildings into which the trains penetrated. Talk about commercial intercourse!. Sadly these protrusions have been removed, the abrupt shunts ended.

And along part of its course buildings seem to have settled snuggly into their assigned places, each a sleeping cat in its hole. If the High Line is allowed to continue and if the governing officialdom permits, I suspect that these ugly but in some way cozy and comforting places will continue to sprout In Rome there is something similar, a stone wall that is some 800 years old, and that, I would guess, once defined the defended sides of the since superseded medieval town. It remains in bits and pieces through the center of the city. People live in it. Buildings rise against it. The locals don’t seem to notice the past-in-the-present that stuns the visiting tourist. In Barcelona the locals treat Goudi’s buildings and park the same casual way. Sleeping, working, playing and relaxing, with hardly an extraneous thought, within a master’s work.

Note that these are wonders, whether tagged with an author’s mark or not, which in some way mimic nature, and have the capacity to entertain, renew, and inspire us; have in part escaped the control and the ideological spin of the governors of convention who treat art as icon. We are told what it is saying and what we should be feeling. We are encouraged to presume that we can’t, and maybe shouldn’t, directly experience these things themselves. The fear: that we might bring a new eye to and from experience

This all happened a few years back and inexplicably I stopped midway in my narrative just at the point when Hi and I set out to explore the Line ourselves. On 31srt Street across the south side of Javits Center. Two ways in, through a parking lot on 30th Street or just off 31st itself, a little twist and jiggle through weeds and stones and there it is, tracks leading up an incline. One foot and then another. Gradually gaining height like a very slow airplane with a floating take-off. toward the West—the Hudson River and the Jersey side are spotted first. Then a turn left and then left again and now facing East. A bowl, made by the high-rises set back a few blocks, and overhead a giant sky, a seemingly far horizon. Continue on, slowly up, now a right turn and the closing in of the sleeping cats, a straight-away. Three people standing abreast with arms stretched to the sides can cover its width. The growth of wildflowers and weeds up to three feet high.

Third floor apartment windows sit directly on the Line’s side, but no one is home. We are alone. On this straight and narrow the sky becomes a blue strip above. We walk on, feels like each step taking us further into the unknown. Without Hi’s cell phone we would have been isolated, out of touch. When we reach Gansevoort we will be one and a half miles from our portal. For me, old and sedentary, it is the surface of the moon. “Hello, Houston.” We are in a natural place. This elevated is man’s construct. Now abandoned, nature begins to return. But a new set of men have been at work: we find a small garden. A square three feet on each side has been dug down deep. And right in front of us a barrier, a steel billboard fifteen feet high, fitted to the side rails, base firmly on the ground, razor wire along the top. A block. Seems that the natives are not friendly. But the engineers and pioneers have been at work. A small scooped out crawl space, the steel above it cut and pulled back slightly. The way through, slide on your back the jagged edge of the cut steel an inch from your nose. Hi talks me though. As we go on we find several other blocks each with its own pass-through neatly engineered. A small square cut in a heavy wire mesh—you get through one limb at a time. Contorting through tightly woven steel fences becomes a habit. It has all the elements of an art happening of the 1970s. Or an Army obstacle course.

The scene along the way constantly changes. We are walking slowly but these switches are fast. There are platform remnants, tunnels, strategic street overlooks, a small gallery of sculpted metal pieces, spikes with pointed ends upward in one place. Finally and at last we meet the stick man. We have seen the whole Line from the inside, passed through it and now we have to do it all again in reverse. A fantastic and unique trip.

The High Line left alone by government and architects with additions by artists, gardeners, and handy tourists would evolve physically, biologically and socially—patched up. Going none-of-us knows where. A little threatening and dangerous, problematic. A place to search for a vision. A retreat. A hobby. A walk and a lark.

On our way out, at the last barrier, we meet a beautiful young Asian woman. She is a student journalist and wants to write a High Line story. (Visitors either write or photograph or built or reconstruct except for her boyfriend, a businessman taking care of business, busy with cell phone, tie and suit, shined shoes. The first barrier stops him. There is an Adam and Eve tale here, ironic and comic. We are all aware of it. Love in the new space, but aside from the beautiful girl most of the elements are missing. So we split, the ukuleles are twanging, the dry grass moving. Hi punchy from all the crossings finds an impossibly small hole in a wire mesh fence on 31st Street slithers through and wanders off. I head south on 10th Avenue snapping digital pictures into the night of red, yellow and green stop lights.

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The High Line belongs within a sociology of almost invisible and seeming inaccessible places. It suggests a social order and a social space full of holes. I hope to develop this concept in future posts.

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I suspect that more people have reached the top of Mount Everest than have walked and explored the High Line in its wild moment.

For more on the High Line see http://www.thehighline.org/ So many members of the elite are for the preservation of the High Line that one suspects it can’t be all good. Yet when they blow the bugle I’ll be standing with them.

The following site is a little dated but it fills in the local history in detail and offers some fine external pictures of the Line. See http://www.oldnyc.com/highline/contents/highline.html

Pictures taken by hikers in 2002 give some idea of the obstacles along the route. See http://q.queso.com/slideShow.php?pic=245

In Paris, France a similar conversion is in place called La Promenade Plantee. See http://www.bridgesandballoons.com/journal/?p=510 and http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x23zd2_sandrines-paris-la-promenade-plante_shortfilms

Stick Man Overlooking Washington and Gansevoort Streets .

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Walking the High Line in New York City.

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