Spectacular High Line park opens on elevated railway
The High Line today unofficially opened half a day early, debuting an elevated space that will undoubtedly turn into Manhattan’s new favorite thing.
In the first hours it was open, people were lounging about, splashing bare feet in the water installation under benches facing the Hudson, taking lunch on the amphitheater steps that now make 10th Avenue look like a stage, and there was even a picture-perfect couple dressed for a wedding.
Already, there is something passionately New York about it. The brilliantly designed space embraces the city’s juxtapositions — it is old and new, for rich and poor, crass and quiet, public yet intimate. Quick-and-dirty condos appear to grow from the same grass as the Empire State Building. Frank Gehry’s modern IAC Building appears as half a bookend to a billboard often plastered with high-fashion models in various stages of faux-orgasm.
The High Line itself was built in the 1930s to move the big freight trains off the West Side streets. Abandoned since the 1980s, the rail line was threatened with demolition until the Friends of the High Line was founded with the crazy idea to turn it into a park.
The High Line will be open every day from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. For now, only one phase is open (up to 20th Street,) and you can enter at Gansevoort and Washington streets, map.
The High Line also opens with a major, though temporary art installation by Spencer Finch in association with Creative Time. “The River That Flows Both Ways,” is 700 individual panels of glass — in hues of blues, purples and greys — fitted into the original High Line window panes that allowed light into the bay of the Nabisco building. Finch plays with parallels between the rail line, where trains ran north and south — and the Hudson, which is not actually a river, but an estuary, and flows “both ways” during each day.
The glass colors are based on the shades of the Hudson. Finch fastened a camera to a tugboat that traveled from the 79th Street Boat Basin up to 120th Street, down to the harbor and back to the basin. The camera took a picture a minute for 700 minutes. The 700 pieces of glass correspond to those colors, starting in the upper left, moving across the top, reading from left to right like a book, according to Meredith Johnson, a curator and producer with Creative Time.
The glass installation will stay up for one year, and when it comes down, only the glass will be removed as the original panes will remain. The architectural glass installation is on the High Line upstairs from Morimoto restaurant.
The free High Line Street Festival is scheduled for July 12 from noon to 5 p.m., and will feature “internationally acclaimed artists,” inflatable sculptures, the World’s Largest Lemonade Stand, cowboys, bands on a roof-top stage, and story-tellers.
It’s a good guess this may be the first of many bride-and-grooms taking pictures on the High Line:
For now, only Phase I is open, from Gansevoort to 20th Street. Foot traffic is intended to go from south to north with exits at 14th, 16th, 18th and 20th streets. The elevator entrance is at 16th Street. Entry may be limited during peak times in June due to anticipated crowds. Bikes, skateboards and dogs are not allowed due to the fragile new plantings (which are based on the volunteer plants that took root when the line was abandoned.)
Snacks are on sale from two food carts on the High Line, both operated by Birdbath bakery. One cart is located on street-level at the Gansevoort Street entrance and the other is on the High Line just above 15th Street. They currently the only food vendors on the High Line and will stay in those two locations for at least 30 day, Ilene Rosen, Bluebird’s savory chef, told NewYorkology.
For comparison, this is how another section of the High Line looked in 2007 during a tour for Open House New York:
Friends of the High Line is still raising funds to complete construction on the next phase of the park, which will extend at least to 30th Street. The hoped-for final section, which loops around half the West Side Rail Yards (just south of the Javits Convention center) may still be demolished to make way for a commercial development. The next public meeting on the topic is Wednesday.
