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The warm, lighted windows of the West
Village at dusk, as the early flakes of nighttime snow began to fall:
these are the images that stick with me from a walk on the High Line,
the abandoned freight railroad that runs along the west side of Manhattan
from 34th to Little West 12th St, three stories above street level.
LB and I set off to take a walk the line on a cold Sunday afternoon in February. We had with us a freelance photographer for a German magazine. None of us had ever been on the line before.
"How will we get up there?" LB asked when we were planning the venture.
"It won't be a problem," I assured him confidently. "I'm sure we can climb up or something."
But I was wrong. When we got to Tenth Avenue, we found there was no way to climb up. The line is about thirty feet up in the air, and the supporting pillars are inset in such a way as to leave several feet of overhang. We walked north and south several blocks, looking for a path. The snow from several days before still lay on the ground and the afternoon weather was cold, so there were few pedestrians. The photographer seemed curious.
"You know how to get up there, right? You planned it out?" he asked.
"Well, we just need to figure out the details," I told him. "If it was easy, everyone would do it."
It goes without saying that, despite the best efforts of art and science, exploring is still mostly a matter of luck. Our luck came in the form of a ripped-out second floor window in an old warehouse building underneath the High Line; it had been raggedly boarded up but I could see spaces. When the coast was clear of passing cars and pedestrians, I jumped up and caught on to the lower edge and hauled myself up. The gap was barely large enough for me to fit through in my bulky winter jacket, but eventually I made it through and into the building. The room I came into was dusty and obviously deserted: I was two floors directly beneath the High Line. There was a door however that led into a stairwell, and when I went through it I realized that this was one of the many old industrial buildings that was now being used as offices. The lower floors had been converted, but when I came to the fourth floor it was dusty and abandoned as well.
I was now at the same level as the High Line and just next to it, and I found a lilliputian-sized hatchway inset into the wall. The bolts were suck and the hinges were rusty, but when I got it open I steeped through and found myself on the train tracks of the line, with the Hudson River on one side and the glorious roofscape of the west village on the other. The sun was near to setting and in the distance the lighted skyscrapers of midtown glowed over the roofscape. I walked to the edge and shouted down to LB and the photographer: "Hey! I made it!" I went back down to give the others a hand. LB handed up my backpack and then struggled to come up himself, barely making it even with my pulling him through. His jacket was covered with dust and his hands were scratched.
"Tell you what," he said. "Now that we're inside, we'll go and open the front door for the photographer, shall we?"
"Shit, LB, that's a good idea," I told him. "Sorry, I should have done that for you. Sorry about your jacket."
We climbed through the small door and walked along the line slowly, struck by the beauty of the scene. Snow lay thick and pure on the surface, marred only by straight lines of the old steel rails that projected through, and the saplings and weeds that grew tall. The clean geometry of the industrial architecture had been softened over time, and it rested in that otherworld that is neither of man nor of nature. Along the sides of the railway were the detritus of the line's functioning: a platform of rotted concrete, rusted and tangle machinery, the graceful railings left over from the depression-era construction.
A smooth wall was covered with the graceful flowering of a graffiti mural, a ten-foot wide production in faded blues and oranges and yellows. The name was familiar: Sacer, an artist whose productions I've enjoyed in other parts of the city before. REVS had signed his name too, in block capitols done with a paint-roller, and I wondered how it is that graffiti artists always manage to get to hidden parts of the city long before I do.
I love roofscapes, and I wanted to get a picture from above of the High Line and the buildings around. There was something that appeared to be an old train platform next to us, and I decided to climb up on the roof above the station to get the vantage point for my shot, climbing up through a collapsed section. When I was halfway there, I reached up to put my camera on the roof above my head. I couple moments later I heard a faint sound. "My camera must have slipped and fallen over in the snow," I thought.
But when I got up, I found that the reality was far worse: I had unsuspectingly placed the camera on the very edge of the roof, and it had fallen a good three stories, onto a first-floor rooftop below. Now I was balanced on the same narrow ledge, with ice and snow making my footing shaky at best. I could see my camera's yellow shoulder strap against the white snow below, but I couldn't see any way to get down to it; it was a three-story sheer wall down to where it was.
I quickly climbed back down and told LB and the photographer the bad news. It was almost assuredly broken beyond repair, and I wasn't sure if it was possible to get to it, but I told them that I wanted to try and retrieve it. We agreed though that we would walk the High Line first and then come back for it, as the sun was setting quickly and the photographer wanted at least a little bit of light for his pictures. We walked toward the north end of the line, with pedestrians and traffic running below. I was fascinated by the fact that we were simultaneously so close and so distant from the people; we were a hundred meters away from 10th Avenue, crowded with pedestrians on every block, and yet ours were the first footsteps in the week-old snow that covered the High Line. To the west, we could see the West Side Highway, with thousands of cars passing every hour; yet how many of them knew that here, ten meters above the streets of the West Village, there was a wilderness of rusting metal and hanging in the air?
"An urban explorer's city is the city without people. The places we see are where people never go; for us, the city could sometimes be a dead city. But this is different. This is urbanity that's in the process of being taken over by nature. A struggle between the clean lines made by man and the organic fecundity of nature. That's when I think it's the most interesting," said LB, when I told him my thoughts. In the struggle between man and nature, nature was clearly winning; the saplings rose above my head, and our knees pushed through the weeds. Or perhaps nature and man-built structure had reached some sort of compromise that elevated them both. On the ground, the trees would hardly have been impressive. But here, elevated far above the street, with their roots contained in a thin plane of dirt and concrete held up on the 70-year-old structure, they became something fascinating and alien.
We walked on toward the north end of the line, passing directly beside some buildings, and through others. One of the most remarkable aspects of the High Line is that it was built to run straight through some buildings-- or perhaps the buildings were built around it; I'm not sure. Either way, the construction facilitated the loading and offloading of the cargo that was once the raison d'etre of Chelsea and the Meatpacking district. Now the line was abandoned and the buildings had been converted to high-priced apartments and lofts, but the tracks remained. In one case, a section of track curved away from the High Line on its own little bridge and butted directly into the sealed wall of a large building. In the 1930s and 40s, trains had actually passed into that building; now the wall was bricked up and the space inside was full of lofts (full of people who were probably rich enough to buy their own locomotives, if they should ever want such a thing). We turned around and headed back before getting to the 34th St. end of the line; it was dark now, and snow was starting to fall again. All around us, New York glittered in the night, the city itself more organic and living than the snow-covered plants at our feet. The Empire State Building shone with red, white, and blue. Amazing that this forgotten parkland where we stood, no older than that building, was once one of the major arteries of the city.
It was full dark by the time we got back to where I'd lost my camera, and golden light spilled from the windows around us and the streetlamps below. Just a couple buildings away from where the camera was, there was a half-demolished building, and by the light of my headlamp I inched across an icy I-beam to the far side, where I could make my way down to a lower section of rooftops. LB and the photographer called out unhelpful advice as I slipped from ladder to ladder, trying not to step too loudly for fear of alarming any residents below. Eventually there was only one ladder left, a rotten wooden thing, but the first two rungs exploded into fragments as I put my weight on them, and I was left hanging by my hands from the ledge, with my feet dangling over air.
Fortunately it wasn't far, and I dropped down instead of using the ladder. My poor camera was there on the ground, the lens shattered into two pieces. The camera body was chipped, although it still clicked (although in a rather mournful way) when I pressed the shutter button. I looked at the chipped casing and was suddenly very glad that it had been the camera, and not me, that had fallen.
I climbed back up with the shattered camera in my pocket. Snow was starting to fall again, and we headed back to the streets for something warm to drink.
LB and I set off to take a walk the line on a cold Sunday afternoon in February. We had with us a freelance photographer for a German magazine. None of us had ever been on the line before.
"How will we get up there?" LB asked when we were planning the venture.
"It won't be a problem," I assured him confidently. "I'm sure we can climb up or something."
But I was wrong. When we got to Tenth Avenue, we found there was no way to climb up. The line is about thirty feet up in the air, and the supporting pillars are inset in such a way as to leave several feet of overhang. We walked north and south several blocks, looking for a path. The snow from several days before still lay on the ground and the afternoon weather was cold, so there were few pedestrians. The photographer seemed curious.
"You know how to get up there, right? You planned it out?" he asked.
"Well, we just need to figure out the details," I told him. "If it was easy, everyone would do it."
It goes without saying that, despite the best efforts of art and science, exploring is still mostly a matter of luck. Our luck came in the form of a ripped-out second floor window in an old warehouse building underneath the High Line; it had been raggedly boarded up but I could see spaces. When the coast was clear of passing cars and pedestrians, I jumped up and caught on to the lower edge and hauled myself up. The gap was barely large enough for me to fit through in my bulky winter jacket, but eventually I made it through and into the building. The room I came into was dusty and obviously deserted: I was two floors directly beneath the High Line. There was a door however that led into a stairwell, and when I went through it I realized that this was one of the many old industrial buildings that was now being used as offices. The lower floors had been converted, but when I came to the fourth floor it was dusty and abandoned as well.
I was now at the same level as the High Line and just next to it, and I found a lilliputian-sized hatchway inset into the wall. The bolts were suck and the hinges were rusty, but when I got it open I steeped through and found myself on the train tracks of the line, with the Hudson River on one side and the glorious roofscape of the west village on the other. The sun was near to setting and in the distance the lighted skyscrapers of midtown glowed over the roofscape. I walked to the edge and shouted down to LB and the photographer: "Hey! I made it!" I went back down to give the others a hand. LB handed up my backpack and then struggled to come up himself, barely making it even with my pulling him through. His jacket was covered with dust and his hands were scratched.
"Tell you what," he said. "Now that we're inside, we'll go and open the front door for the photographer, shall we?"
"Shit, LB, that's a good idea," I told him. "Sorry, I should have done that for you. Sorry about your jacket."
We climbed through the small door and walked along the line slowly, struck by the beauty of the scene. Snow lay thick and pure on the surface, marred only by straight lines of the old steel rails that projected through, and the saplings and weeds that grew tall. The clean geometry of the industrial architecture had been softened over time, and it rested in that otherworld that is neither of man nor of nature. Along the sides of the railway were the detritus of the line's functioning: a platform of rotted concrete, rusted and tangle machinery, the graceful railings left over from the depression-era construction.
A smooth wall was covered with the graceful flowering of a graffiti mural, a ten-foot wide production in faded blues and oranges and yellows. The name was familiar: Sacer, an artist whose productions I've enjoyed in other parts of the city before. REVS had signed his name too, in block capitols done with a paint-roller, and I wondered how it is that graffiti artists always manage to get to hidden parts of the city long before I do.
I love roofscapes, and I wanted to get a picture from above of the High Line and the buildings around. There was something that appeared to be an old train platform next to us, and I decided to climb up on the roof above the station to get the vantage point for my shot, climbing up through a collapsed section. When I was halfway there, I reached up to put my camera on the roof above my head. I couple moments later I heard a faint sound. "My camera must have slipped and fallen over in the snow," I thought.
But when I got up, I found that the reality was far worse: I had unsuspectingly placed the camera on the very edge of the roof, and it had fallen a good three stories, onto a first-floor rooftop below. Now I was balanced on the same narrow ledge, with ice and snow making my footing shaky at best. I could see my camera's yellow shoulder strap against the white snow below, but I couldn't see any way to get down to it; it was a three-story sheer wall down to where it was.
I quickly climbed back down and told LB and the photographer the bad news. It was almost assuredly broken beyond repair, and I wasn't sure if it was possible to get to it, but I told them that I wanted to try and retrieve it. We agreed though that we would walk the High Line first and then come back for it, as the sun was setting quickly and the photographer wanted at least a little bit of light for his pictures. We walked toward the north end of the line, with pedestrians and traffic running below. I was fascinated by the fact that we were simultaneously so close and so distant from the people; we were a hundred meters away from 10th Avenue, crowded with pedestrians on every block, and yet ours were the first footsteps in the week-old snow that covered the High Line. To the west, we could see the West Side Highway, with thousands of cars passing every hour; yet how many of them knew that here, ten meters above the streets of the West Village, there was a wilderness of rusting metal and hanging in the air?
"An urban explorer's city is the city without people. The places we see are where people never go; for us, the city could sometimes be a dead city. But this is different. This is urbanity that's in the process of being taken over by nature. A struggle between the clean lines made by man and the organic fecundity of nature. That's when I think it's the most interesting," said LB, when I told him my thoughts. In the struggle between man and nature, nature was clearly winning; the saplings rose above my head, and our knees pushed through the weeds. Or perhaps nature and man-built structure had reached some sort of compromise that elevated them both. On the ground, the trees would hardly have been impressive. But here, elevated far above the street, with their roots contained in a thin plane of dirt and concrete held up on the 70-year-old structure, they became something fascinating and alien.
We walked on toward the north end of the line, passing directly beside some buildings, and through others. One of the most remarkable aspects of the High Line is that it was built to run straight through some buildings-- or perhaps the buildings were built around it; I'm not sure. Either way, the construction facilitated the loading and offloading of the cargo that was once the raison d'etre of Chelsea and the Meatpacking district. Now the line was abandoned and the buildings had been converted to high-priced apartments and lofts, but the tracks remained. In one case, a section of track curved away from the High Line on its own little bridge and butted directly into the sealed wall of a large building. In the 1930s and 40s, trains had actually passed into that building; now the wall was bricked up and the space inside was full of lofts (full of people who were probably rich enough to buy their own locomotives, if they should ever want such a thing). We turned around and headed back before getting to the 34th St. end of the line; it was dark now, and snow was starting to fall again. All around us, New York glittered in the night, the city itself more organic and living than the snow-covered plants at our feet. The Empire State Building shone with red, white, and blue. Amazing that this forgotten parkland where we stood, no older than that building, was once one of the major arteries of the city.
It was full dark by the time we got back to where I'd lost my camera, and golden light spilled from the windows around us and the streetlamps below. Just a couple buildings away from where the camera was, there was a half-demolished building, and by the light of my headlamp I inched across an icy I-beam to the far side, where I could make my way down to a lower section of rooftops. LB and the photographer called out unhelpful advice as I slipped from ladder to ladder, trying not to step too loudly for fear of alarming any residents below. Eventually there was only one ladder left, a rotten wooden thing, but the first two rungs exploded into fragments as I put my weight on them, and I was left hanging by my hands from the ledge, with my feet dangling over air.
Fortunately it wasn't far, and I dropped down instead of using the ladder. My poor camera was there on the ground, the lens shattered into two pieces. The camera body was chipped, although it still clicked (although in a rather mournful way) when I pressed the shutter button. I looked at the chipped casing and was suddenly very glad that it had been the camera, and not me, that had fallen.
I climbed back up with the shattered camera in my pocket. Snow was starting to fall again, and we headed back to the streets for something warm to drink.
| Originally built in 1934 as part of Robert Moses'
grand West Side Improvement Project, the High Line was used ferry
incoming freight from the West Side's shipping docks to the industrial
areas of the Meat Packing district and beyond. Abandoned since the 1980s and partially torn down, the old freight railroad line is supported on graceful iron piers, rusting slowly beneath their rivets and paint. A luxuriant growth of grass and weeds and small saplings now covers the concrete and old wooden ties. I'd often noticed the line overhead when my peregrinations took me through the West Village, where it runs parallel to 10th Avenue. My research on the structure led first to the Friends of the High Line, a not-for-profit group that advocates turning the 1.45 miles of the structure that still remain into an open pedestrian trail. They are engaged in long-term struggle with the Chelsea Property Owners Association, which thinks that tearing down the structure-- which is still owned by CSX, the freight rail company-- will raise property values for the land directly beneath. Lawsuits have gone back and forth; the Giuliani administration originally approved the destruction in the 1990s, but more recently the Friends of the High Line were able to delay the destruction pending further review of the conversion plan. Some of the structure has already been torn down. Originally it stretched all the way to Clarkson St., just one block north of West Houston, but the southernmost section was town down in the 1960s, and another section was torn down in the early 1990s. What remains, however, is a fascinating and beautiful relic of old New York, a truly remarkable space where forests of saplings rise from a path that threads its way through the converted industrial buildings and above the streets. It is a wilderness in the middle of the city, all the more remarkable for the fact that it sits, for the most part unseen, just a few hundred meters from Tenth Avenue. |