The final section of the High Line, the Rail Yards, opened this week. Photo by Alex Ulam.
The nature is wilder and the views more spectacular along the new and final section of the High Line, which opened to the public this past Sunday, fittingly on the same day of the People’s Climate March. Surrounding me was one of the largest expanses of open skyline in Manhattan. Underfoot was a landscape consisting of rusted rails, wildflowers, and scrappy wild grasses fluttering in the wind—an example of the original self-seeded raw landscape that took hold after the trains stopped running in 1980. Photographs of this scrappy bit of urban nature played a critical role in the campaign to save the abandoned elevated rail trestle and convert it into a unique public park 30 feet above Manhattan’s busy streets. Until the opening of the new section, the journey along the High Line primarily ran through narrow canyons of buildings and offered mostly snapshot views of the streets below. Part of the charm was not knowing what was ahead, playing hide-and-seek with the city beneath your feet while discovering hidden gardens and outlooks that the High Line’s design team of James Corner Field Operations, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and Piet Oudolf had designed along the old rail trestle.
But the new Rail Yards section trades secrets for dramatic panoramas and transitions from simulacra of a wild landscape to a largely self-seeded one. From many vantage points here, you can see most of the rest of the elevated park section, which begins at 30th Street and runs along the edge of the West Side Highway before looping back and sloping down to its final terminus at West 34th Street. In front of me, a procession of hundreds of visitors was discovering the working parts of the city usually hidden from public view. Below this skyway is still the resting place for commuter railcars and scaffolding for the Hudson Yards project, one of the largest construction sites in North America. But the showstopper here is the long, open-air balcony view of the Hudson River that is more expansive than the views available to many inhabitants of the luxury riverfront towers nearby. Here, many people rest on informal benches made from stacked beams, taking in the verdant treetop views of Hudson River Park directly across the highway.
The Rail Yards section of the High Line also includes a host of new features designed for children. At an enclosed sunken area called the Pershing Square Beams, where the High Line’s deck is stripped away to reveal the massive steel girders supporting the structure, small children peer through viewing tubes and clamber over beams coated in silicon for security. In another area, there are interactive benches that make chime sounds and defunct rail switches that you can play with. Many of the new design elements and public art at the Rail Yards reflect the rougher landscape once found here. A fenced-off section of the original wild landscape contains The Evolution of God, a series of 13 large sculptures by Adrián Villar Rojas that are designed to decay, a fitting complement to the High Line’s mysterious intermingling of organic and nonorganic materials. Composed of cement, soil, seeds, clothing, and rope, these gray blocks of various matter are already cracking open to provide fissures for seeds within to sprout. It is appropriate that the Rail Yards section of the High Line reintroduces us to the original landscape of wildflowers, shrubs, and wild grasses that launched the campaign to save the structure.
It is incredible that only 15 years ago, this structure was viewed as an impediment to development by many power brokers in the real estate industry. And yet today, this recycled relic of the postindustrial age has not only become one of the most popular amenities in the city, but it has also become a catalyst for the development boom in surrounding neighborhoods. Seeing the participants in the People’s Climate March festooned with buttons and carrying their placards through this once-endangered landscape gave me hope that someday, in the not-too-distant future, similar seismic changes can be made in the fight against climate change.
Alex Ulam is a frequent contributor to LAM.
Leave a Reply