Living the High Line
After a blissful week spent in cool, beautiful libraries in New Haven, I snuck back to New York for the weekend to finish my cultural tour. Those of you who follow my Twitter account will have seen my attempt at ‘live tweeting’ my visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I’d be glad to know what you thought. I am slowly thinking through a sort of ‘valedictory’ post on American museums, in which it will feature more fully. In the meantime, I also visited a fairly new arrival on New York’s cultural scene: The High Line: a 1-mile long modern park, created out of the raised tracks of the New York Central railway.
It is extraordinary. Starting at 30th street, you climb modern, industrial stairs, to a smooth concrete path between densely planted beds of grasses, trees and shrubs. You look out over the surrounding New York skyline and, I was surprised to notice, watch butterflies flutter past. As you follow the park down towards 14th street, I initially thought it would simply be more of the same, but it opens out and varies, creating a real public space. There are off-set areas with seats and sound installations – Uri Aran’s Untitled (Good and Bad) series of animal names has been beautifully parodied by residents on a nearby roof who have created their own ‘High line zoo’ of cardboard animals. There are areas of lawn, with amphitheate-style seating where they clearly project films – although, delightfully, a tree has currently grown across the main projection wall. There is a series of art installations entitled Lilliput, siting small sculptures in surprising parts of the park.
Walk further and you find eateries and bars, ice cream stalls, and even a small shop for the High Line selling excellent and well-thought merchandise (I feel another post on museum shops may come soon). The downtown end is set to become the new home of the Whitney Museum of American Art (about which I blogged previously) in 2015, which will give a wonderful focus to the tail of the park and draw visitors into and out of the two spaces. This is, indeed, clearly a space that people use and love. Even in the intense heat last Sunday morning it was busy and thriving, people had bought picnics and children's toys, were browsing the stalls, and enjoying the Mexican ice lollies. This is a spectacular regeneration of urban space and a real asset to New York. I felt it was exactly what so many of the edgier gardens at RHS Chelsea Flower Show (again previously discussed) try to create year on year. I’m excited to hear of a new, complementary plan to create an underground park out of an old trolley terminal on the lower east side: 'the Low Line.' Perhaps they could bring part of it to create a new ‘Fresh Garden’ at Chelsea?