I Walk the Line: New York’s High Line and the Drama of Urban Space
Back in 2011, while visiting the West Village, I remember being charmed by a few inviting scraps of weed-covered track hovering over the streets, like aqueducts, and wondering what it would be like to explore them. When I heard that the old elevated railroad had been turned into a 1.5 mile connected park up the west side, I half-imaged it as a modest, meandering garden path, with shady nooks, and mid-level views of old brick buildings not normally available at street level.
So, in May of 2019, as I climbed the staircase on W 30th St. leading to the northern end of the High Line, I had little idea of what to expect. Knowing nothing of its history nor its design, I was coming in blind. “One must be receptive,” writes Gaston Bachelard, in The Poetics of Space, “receptive to the image at the moment it appears…Very often, then, it is in the opposite of causality, that is, in reverberation…that I think we find the real measure of the being of a poetic image.”
And so, when I reached the top of the steps, I froze. I had stumbled upon a space in medias res — in the middle of things. It felt heavy, pressurized, a stasis formed by a balance between two competing forces: a park in mid-blossom, a city in mid-pounce.
I started walking. There were grottoes, pinch points, and shady overhangs. The flow of the path felt orchestrated yet natural, like the swelling and contraction of a symphony. Or like breathing.
Robert Hammond, co-founder and executive director of Friends of the High Line, once said in an interview, “Our primary focus is New Yorkers: tourists are fine, but we always prioritize New Yorkers.” But on this Friday afternoon, the place was packed with tourists, enjoying the freedom from traffic. Architect Harvey Wiley Corbett had envisioned just such a space a century ago:
According to Rem Koolhaas, in Delirious New York, “Not for a moment does [Corbett] intend to relieve congestion; his true ambition is to escalate it to such intensity that it generates…a completely new condition, where congestion becomes mysteriously positive.” Although the High Line was quite congested, it did, in fact, feel “mysteriously positive,” even airy. There are glimpses of the Hudson, and several views overlooking the streets to the east. At one point, a benched amphitheater offers a view straight up 10th Avenue, as if the entire city were a spectacular drama — which, of course, it is.
It wasn’t long after starting to walk the Line that I sensed the city orienting itself around the space. There was a certain sentient quality to it, like in William Stafford’s poem, “Traveling Through the Dark”:
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.
The space is affecting the shape of the surrounding architecture — or at least those buildings that are sensitive to it — as in the striking 520 West 28th, designed by Zaha Hadid:
The High Line also appears to be reversing history. According to Andrew S. Dolkart, of the Columbia University School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation:
In 1916, New York passed the first zoning law in America, and because New Yorkers did not want to cap the height of skyscrapers, they decided that they would regulate the shape of skyscrapers. The idea was that that light and air would reach the sidewalk; light and air were a major issue. So the law stated that you could build right up to the lot line on your building and you could rise up to a certain height and then once you reached that height, you had to step back, you had to set the bulk of the building back.
The buildings around the High Line, though, are leaning into, and over, the path, like tree branches reaching into the sun, or people bowing their heads:
An entire ecosystem has sprung up around the High Line. According to Google Maps, there is the AVA High Line apartment building; the Highline Deli; the Highline Pizzeria; Eco Highline Cleaners, a whole block to the east; the Highline Ballroom; the High Line Hotel, featuring “Vintage-chic lodging in former dormitory”; and The Standard, High Line, a “Funky hotel offering sleek quarters with scenic views, plus eclectic dining & 2 rooftop bars.”
At the same time, there was — conversely — a feeling of impending menace toward the trail and the people using it, a sense of the ability of a moneyed class to colonize a space not designed for them:
Little wonder that the northern terminus of the High Line is Hudson Yards, the privately-developed, $25 billion project for the ultra-wealthy. Hamilton Nolan, writing in The Guardian, called Hudson Yards an “ultracapitalist equivalent of the Forbidden City, a Chichen Itza with a better mall and slightly better-concealed human sacrifice.”
The tallest building in the complex has an outdoor observation deck 1100 feet over the city, that juts out 65 feet into space. Justin Davidson, writing at New York magazine, says the building looks like a “high-browed robotic duck with a beak so generous you could almost land a helicopter on it.”
In his poem, “The Heaven of Animals,” James Dickey imagines a paradise where “the landscape flowers/Outdoing, desperately/Outdoing what is required” for creatures to thrive according to their true natures. He describes what that means for the predators:
For some of these,
It could not be the place
It is, without blood.
These hunt, as they have done,
But with claws and teeth grown perfect,More deadly than they can believe.
They stalk more silently,
And crouch on the limbs of trees,
And their descent
Upon the bright backs of their preyMay take years
In a sovereign floating of joy.
I could sense that vast crouch while walking through Hudson Yards, and through the rest of the stupendous building boom surrounding the High Line.
It will be interesting to see the High Line a year from now, even though my new-found knowledge of the park — not to mention this article — will deprive me of the poetic reverberations of my first visit. I will come to it with a more jaded eye. I hope that the space will have maintained its dramatic stasis, will have held its own against the surrounding forces.
Those forces are formidable. Even Central Park, at 843 acres, is being encroached upon by the new breed of super-spires, like Central Park Tower (1,550 feet) and 111 W 57th Street (1,428 feet):
Will the narrow corridor of the High Line withstand the strain? Probably. “New York can absorb even this,” writes Davidson. “Offices will hum with necessary invention, the plaza will teem, and the towers will settle into the accommodating skyline.”
In other words, as Dickey wrote in his poem,
And those that are hunted
Know this as their life,
Their reward: to walkUnder such trees in full knowledge
Of what is in glory above them,
And to feel no fear,
But acceptance, compliance.
Fulfilling themselves without painAt the cycle’s center,
They tremble, they walk
Under the tree,
They fall, they are torn,
They rise, they walk again.
