A Commune With the City

The High Line opened earlier this month, an abandoned elevated railway turned park on the lower west side. It was built in the 1930s as a short line to service the manufacturing concerns in the area, including the cattle needs of the Meatpacking District. By the 1990s, as factories left the city and the neighborhood declined, it was derelict and slated for demolition. Rather than knock it down as a now-unsavory relic of a bygone area, a couple visionaries saw its potential as a greenway – a uniquely New York expression of the rails-to-trials movement.

The new High Line is an elevated urban promenade, the first portion of which runs from Gansevoort Street to 20th Street. It's a space to commune with nature, including plant species indigenous to Manhattan. It's an oasis of calm hovering above the hustle-bustle. It's also a place to commune with the city. By removing oneself from the life of the street, by changing one's perception – by surveying the city from a perch one story up – one can see the city with new eyes. Its magnificent architecture, garish commercialism, relentless energy, surprising quaintness, its natural beauty is revealed, as if to remind us of the possibility of being in gotham but not of it.