High Line: The Inside Story of New York City's Park in the Sky

About this book

"High Line: The Inside Story of New York City's Park in the Sky," published in 2011 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is the first-person account written by Joshua David and Robert Hammond, the two cofounders of Friends of the High Line, of how an abandoned elevated freight railway in New York City's Meatpacking District and West Chelsea neighbourhood was transformed over a decade into one of the most celebrated and visited public parks in the world. The book is simultaneously a story about urban preservation and adaptive reuse, a case study in community organising and civic advocacy, and a meditation on the relationship between urban decay, creative imagination, and the political dynamics of city planning. The High Line was originally built between 1929 and 1934 as part of the West Side Improvement Project, a major infrastructure initiative to remove the dangerous at-grade rail freight line that had run along Tenth Avenue—so dangerous, in fact, that the street was commonly known as "Death Avenue." The elevated structure carried freight trains to the meat-packing and warehouse district of the Far West Side, delivering directly to loading docks on the upper storeys of factories and warehouses.

By the 1950s, road transport had largely displaced rail freight, and the southern section of the High Line was demolished. The remaining northern section carried its last train in 1980, and by the 1990s the structure had been abandoned for nearly two decades, its tracks covered by a self-seeded meadow of wild grasses, flowers, and woody plants growing from the debris that had accumulated in the gravel ballast. Joshua David and Robert Hammond first encountered the High Line in 1999, at a community board meeting convened to consider proposals for its demolition.

Both were newcomers to the neighbourhood—David, a journalist and writer; Hammond, a financial services professional and artist—and both were immediately captivated by the melancholy beauty of the ruin and the extraordinary urban views it commanded from fifteen feet above street level. On the strength of their shared conviction that the structure could be transformed into a public park, they formed Friends of the High Line that same year and began the decade-long campaign that would lead to the park's opening. The book traces this campaign in vivid, candid detail.

The early years were characterised by frustration and near-constant setbacks. The landowners along the High Line's route, who owned the air rights above the structure, were largely hostile to preservation, preferring demolition to development. The city government was unenthusiastic.

The railroads that nominally owned the structure were engaged in complex negotiations with developers and regulators. David and Hammond had no political connections, no planning expertise, no technical knowledge of infrastructure, and no substantial funding. What they did have was a clear vision, boundless energy, and an instinct for civic organising.

They commissioned architectural photography of the overgrown structure by the photographer Joel Sternfeld, whose images of the wild meadow growing on the abandoned elevated railway gave the preservation campaign its most powerful visual argument—demonstrating that the structure was not simply a piece of rusting industrial infrastructure but a rare urban landscape of extraordinary character. These photographs circulated widely, building public support and attracting the attention of architects, landscape architects, and urban designers who recognised the potential of the project. The book describes in detail the political and legal battles that shaped the project's trajectory.

A crucial turning point was the election of Michael Bloomberg as Mayor of New York in 2001 and the appointment of Amanda Burden as City Planning Commissioner. Both proved to be committed supporters of the High Line preservation effort, and the Bloomberg administration ultimately provided the political will and municipal investment that made the project possible. The design competition for the High Line is described in the book as one of the most significant events in the project's development.

Held in 2003, the competition attracted submissions from landscape architects, architects, and urban designers around the world. The winning scheme by landscape architecture firm James Corner Field Operations and architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, developed in collaboration with horticulturalist Piet Oudolf, proposed a promenade that would preserve and build upon the wild, self-seeded character of the abandoned elevated railway—retaining some sections of the original track and ballast, integrating the existing vegetation into the planting design, and creating a walkway that moved continuously between overhead and underfoot levels in a sequence of spatially varied experiences. The book concludes with the opening of the first section of the park in June 2009 and the subsequent opening of sections two and three in 2011 and 2014.

By the time of publication, the High Line had become an international model for the adaptive reuse of industrial infrastructure as public open space. Sources: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Amazon; Macmillan; Goodreads; Friends of the High Line.