Take a trip on the scariest ride in town: the now mile-long High Line, home to thrills and chills that run deeper than fear of park muggings in the bad old days.
Everyone loves the High Line — its fabulousness has been proclaimed by architects, landscape designers and by just about every human being who’s walked upon it. But even its most ardent fans seem at a loss to articulate its disquieting emotional impact, which touches me more than rolling chairs on rail tracks and talking water fountains.
The $153 million it took to reinvent the derelict trestle bought more than pretty flowers and arresting views. The High Line tells a story of regeneration and renewal, but tinted with intimations of mortality a stroller may sense but not quite understand. It was there from the outset, but did not fully emerge until the opening of the second part this month.
Lest anyone think I’m nuts, the High Line is first and foremost an ingenious, happy reclamation of an urban ruin for public recreation above the mean streets. Standing amidst the park’s glorious vegetation, it’s a joy to catch the river breeze, see the Empire State Building from a new angle and gaze through windows so near, you wonder how those inside shield their intimate lives from nosy parkgoers.
But I’ve watched visitors to the new, northern half gaze at brooding walls and tenements looking puzzled by their own fascination with sights normally regarded as mundane. Hello, subliminal narrative!
Between Gansevoort Street and Midtown’s fringe, parkgoers enjoy a walk that feels like a ride — a slow-motion passage on long-gone trains conjured with insistent force by the peek-a-boo tracks. Riding the J train through Brooklyn, I’ve often wished I could get off and savor the cityscape from 30 feet above the street. The High Line lets you do just that.
The ride traverses a linear, elevated botanical garden — a suave simulacrum of the wildflower jungle that flourished after the trains stopped running. You don’t need to know the names of 300 types of plantings to love designer James Corner’s evocation of the trestle’s 30-year twilight zone. Even when barren in winter, it holds nature’s promise of inevitable rebirth.
But the locomotive simultaneously draws you on a darker journey through overlapping architectural strata — especially in the new section, where many of the buildings that hug the trestle date to the late 19th century.
You needn’t have the least interest in prewar masonry construction or modern curtain-wall design to perceive the duel between structures erected before the auto age and those only recently sprung from Manhattan schist. The weathered brick facades with ghost signs for vanished warehouses are as subject to extinction as the departed relics that made way for the shimmering new apartment buildings HL26 and 245 Tenth.
The sense of precariousness pervades the park’s entire length. It doesn’t take a preservationist’s bleeding heart to grasp that even brand-new towers that look destined to stand forever one day will be gone. While the flowers and trees wither and blossom in perpetually repeating cycles, man-made works, once demolished, will not be back with spring, but yield to new waves of mortar and glass.
The permanent and passing phenomena reveal themselves in a tense duet. Viewed simultaneously and up close as the High Line uniquely allows, they gently impress upon us the inescapability of time and our fleeting hold on it.
The poet Emily Dickinson stated, “Nature is a haunted house; art is a house that tries to be haunted.” The High Line is both. Its ghosts tell of the cities of New York that lived before ours — and remind us that today’s city too will give way to one we will not be here to see.