The High Line Park is substantially, and gloriously, finished. Today’s opening to the public of its long-awaited third portion, called High Line at the Rail Yards, leaves only a short spur to be completed next year.
And for the first time, the vision of Robert Hammond and Joshua David, who dreamed up the whole thing, can be appreciated whole.
Of course, it’s a magnificent, free-to-all public park that drew 4.8 million visitors last year; an instant architectural icon that’s the envy of cities the world over; and the catalyst for billions of dollars of development on the once desolate Far West Side.
But for all its pleasures, the High Line was missing a limb, as if its growth had been cruelly stunted at West 30th Street.
Like most New Yorkers, I loved the 1.5-mile-long park’s first two portions running north from Gansevoort Street. The landscaped trestle 30 feet above the street offers arresting views as it meanders through a shifting kaleidoscope of the city’s architectural strata, from 19th century tenements to 21st century condos.
But the chain-link fence at 30th Street has seemed like a slap in the face since the second phase opened two years ago.
Vestiges of a lost industrial age, views of buildings destined to fall for new ones, strike a melancholy chord. But sadness over the irretrievable past is tempered, and finally overcome, by the promise, and visible reality, of regeneration.
That sense of renewal is best captured by walking the High Line not from the Gansevoort Street section, which opened five years ago, but from its new northern terminus. A journey south starting on West 34th Street proceeds in stages from the yards’ near-desolation to the Meatpacking District’s and the West Village’s life-affirming density. (More practically speaking, if you go in the other direction, you’ll end up at a West 34th Street backwater remote from stores, restaurants and subways).
Unlike the eloquently landscaped earlier sections, High Line at the Rail Yards looks naked. Rising gently from the entrance on 34th Street, it consists mainly of a simple, half-mile long loop around the exposed (for now) Amtrak train yard.
The walkway is relatively narrow — much of the trestle’s width is taken up by a beautiful but off-limits re-creation of old tracks and wildflowers of the kind that sprang up after the trains stopped running in 1980.
The walkway, surfaced in a twinkling, black, stone-based material prosaically called “bonded aggregate,” offers little in the way of fun features. Kids can frolic on the Pershing Square Beams, an exposed original framework of safety-coated steel gridwork.
But it’s basically an exposed parabola leading to points unknown. Minimalist landscaping and detailing by designers James Corner Field Operations, Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Piet Oudolf allow free rein to extreme views of the Hudson River and the sunken, sooty train yard.
This is a very different High Line than earlier parkgoers have seen and will disappoint only those blind and deaf to urban romance. The restored tracks made me yearn to see an old freight rumble by, and occasional whistles from the live yard doubled-down on the haunting.
That mood will change over time as Related Companies’ huge Hudson Yards project brings skyscrapers and parks to a platform yet to be installed above the yard. But for now, the new segment makes a moody overture to the park’s richly orchestrated passages to the south, where the route reveals skyline surprises at every turn and buildings straddle the path like ancient colossi.
It’s a triumphant climax to a journey that began on the sweet, soft note of a train whistle.