Before 2009 High Line was
is a 1.45-mile-long abandoned
elevated railway. Today The High Line is a public park owned by the City of New
York, and maintained and operated by
“Friends of the High Line” founded in 1999 by community residents. Tripdavisor ranked it #18 of 747 attractions in New York City – higher than New York Public Library and Grand Central Terminal. High Line is the winner of Travelers' Choice® 2013.
Millions of people are visiting it every year, making the High Line the
most visited park per acre in the city.
In 2011 3.7 million people visited the High, only half of them New Yorkers. In 2012, the High Line welcomed more than 4.4
million visitors.
In 1847 the new line with railroad tracks for freight
trains was built on the West Side of Manhattan. The traffic
was heavy and accidents began occurring
between trains, pedestrians and
horses. Men on horses had to ride
in front of trains waving flags to free the way . They were called the WestSide Cowboys. In order to eliminate
hazardous conditions the state of New
York and the New York Central Railroad opened The High Line to trains in 1934,
removing dangerous trains from the streets.
The price of the line was over $150 million in 1930 dollars—more than $2
billion in today's dollars. The High
Line was designed to go through the center of blocks and
connected directly to factories and warehouses, allowing trains to roll
right inside the buildings. Milk, meat,
produce, and raw and manufactured goods could come and go without causing any
street-level traffic.
The double-line viaduct was built strong enough to support
two fully loaded freight trains. After
the World War II the Interstate highway
network grew, and the rise of the automobile led to drop of a rail traffic. In
1960s the railroad line was operating in
the red. The last freight delivery on the remaining northern part of the line
took place in 1980 with three carloads of frozen turkeys. The most southern part of High Line was
dismantled and the High Line stay abandoned for the next twenty years.
In 1999, the community group Friends of the High Line was
formed by Joshua David and Robert Hammond, residents of the neighborhood. Robert, graduated with Honors in History from
Princeton University, lived in the West Village since 1994. Joshua, with BA
from University of Pennsylvania, has
lived in Chelsea since 1986 and was a freelance magazine writer. The Friends
used Promenade Plantée in Paris as a prototype for the proposed elevated
park.
Robert Hammond said:
I lived in the
neighborhood so I had always seen it when walking around, but I didn’t think it
was all connected. I really didn’t think that much about it until I read an
article in The New York Times in the summer of ’99 that said it was threatened
with demolition, and it included a map. …
I assumed someone
would be working to preserve it. I called around and thought the American
Institute of Architects or the Municipal Arts Society would be working on this.
So many things in New York have preservation groups attached to them. But
pretty quickly I found no one was doing anything for the High Line and that it
was actually going to be demolished. I heard the proposed demolition was on the
agenda for a community board meeting in my neighborhood so I went to my first
community board meeting ever and sat next to Joshua, who I didn’t know at the
time. By the end of the meeting we realized everyone in the room was in favor
of demolition except for us. So we exchanged business cards and we said, “Well
why don’t we start something together?”
In 2002 Friends of the High Line gains first City
support and in 2003 a competition started. 720 teams from 36 countries entered
the competition and hundreds of design entries were displayed at Grand Central
Terminal. In 2006 the winning project by
James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro was on display in
the Museum of Modern Arts and in the same year the construction of the first
section begun. In June 2009 the first
Section was opened to Public.
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