The High Line

Abstract

History breaks down into images, not into stories. --Walter Benjamin, Passagenwerk City of New York has a new public space. High Line is an eight-block stretch of defunct elevated train track remade into a public park that opened in June 2009. This renewed, reclaimed ruin embodies several key moments in modernity: steam engine, public promenade, flaneur, arcade, and cinema--as articulated by Walter Benjamin. Effectively, High Line functions as a monument to ruins of modernity. However, as a contemporary site designed by savvy architects, High Line is neither a simple representation of modern forms nor a replay of a nineteenth-century monument--one that claims permanence while articulating a triumph inevitably passed. Presenting a scripted urban imaginary, High Line suspends visitors in a state of collapsed time and space organized into cinematic images--one that invites them to reflect on collective experience of metropolis. High Line runs along Manhattan's West Side near Hudson River, currently reaching from Gansevoort Street in Meatpacking District to 34th Street in Chelsea. Designed by James Corner Field Operations with Diller, Scofidio & Renfro, track has been transformed into an elevated urban park, a sculpted that meanders slightly through buildings along 10th Avenue. High Line was built in 1930s to enable efficient delivery of goods to and from industrial businesses and to prevent accidents with street-level traffic. Mail, milk, poultry, and automobiles could be loaded and unloaded directly into buildings that opened onto track. This freight-only line was known as The Life Line of New York. Out of use by 1980, it was abandoned until 1999, when Friends of High Line began campaigning to develop elevated land into a public park. Today, walking up stairs to three-story-high space, visitor enters a magical zone. Immediately lifted from drudgery, dinge, and chaos of city streets, one ascends to wild landscaping, fresh views, wooden benches, strolling citizens, and buildings parting to make a path. Standard Hotel towers over southern stretch a magnificent relic of International Style architecture. Slits in irregular concrete ground transition into selectively preserved stretches of train track that serve as plant beds. It is a disorienting, yet strangely harmonious blend of industrial decay and ever developing city, of nostalgia and innovation. landscaping is especially uncanny as grasses, flowers, and small trees fill gaps in what remains of tracks. Keep it wild, keep on path signs instruct passersby, as if landscaping were indigenous, happenstance. grasses and flowers look suspiciously like weeds, but perfectly arranged and tended to. This celebration of a once seamy and neglected space artfully finesses effect of dereliction, giving way to a safely sanitized experiential pleasure. ruin is renovated. TRAIN If one could choose a primary icon for modernity it might be steam engine. invention of steam engine introduced unprecedented speed and efficiency to movement of goods and people during nineteenth century, thus enabling industrial capitalism--the distribution of consumer goods produced by industrialized labor and tourism. According to Marx, the key aspects of modernity were dramatic changes in consciousness brought about by industrialized space and time--the 'annihilation of space by time.' (1) Trains of all types were a mainstay at World's Fair exhibitions of nineteenth and twentieth centuries, celebrating spirit of technological innovation. This progression of train exhibits, including steam engines, diesel trains, and elevated subway trains, culminated in use of monorails during 1962 and 1964 World's Fairs. Today, a monorail is centerpiece of Disney World's Epcot Center Future World. …