What You Can See From the High Line
Back in the late 1990s, when Joshua David and I founded Friends of the High Line, a grass-roots organization dedicated to keeping a decrepit elevated freight railway on the west side of Manhattan from being demolished, we could never have predicted how creating a 1.45-mile-long park would also transform the gritty underpopulated industrial blocks alongside it into a bustling area that is now home to some of the flashiest real estate on the planet. Today, the High Line attracts tourists but also, contrary to what you might think, plenty of New Yorkers. And in the process it has inspired cities all over the world to reimagine their own old urban infrastructure. Today its success seems inevitable. How it actually turned out this way is harder to pin down.
Back in 2004, as we (with the visionary backing of the Bloomberg administration) sought proposals for a park design, we had only the vaguest notions of what all this might look like, and how it would function. Did the rusty ruin covered in wildflowers have to 'do' something and what would that be exactly?
There were a lot of people who helped out on that, but perhaps the most important one, especially in the beginning when the vision was being set, was the architect Ricardo Scofidio, who died on March 6 at age 89. I can't walk on the High Line and not think about how radical and uncompromising so many of his ideas were, but also how he was able to compromise, taking into account other people's ideas, or just practical considerations. And yet the park never feels compromised.
Four design teams were the finalists in 2004, including Steven Holl, who had in the 1980s proposed building a series of houses atop the High Line (the model of which is in the collection of MoMA today). There was Zaha Hadid's proposal, which was futuristic and artificial, involving, as I recall, AstroTurf. The architect Michael Van Valkenburgh wanted to create a new version of the old abandoned tracks, imitating as close as possible the industrial detritus and wild landscape that was already there. None seemed quite right.
Then there was the team that included Mr. Scofidio and his wife and fellow architect, Elizabeth Diller, as well as the landscape architect James Corner Field Operations and the garden designer Piet Oudolf. I don't remember exactly what this team said in their presentation, but I remember the feeling of it. Ms. Diller and Mr. Scofidio started arguing — first with each other, then with Mr. Corner.
Perfect, we thought, and hired them.
As it turns out, it was Mr. Scofidio we mostly worked with, since around that time his firm, Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, won a competition to rethink parts of Lincoln Center, and Ms. Diller focused more on that.
I was at first a bit disappointed. It was Ms. Diller who had dazzled me with her infectious energy and big ideas during the selection process. Mr. Scofidio was quieter, more reserved. He had a kind of built-in glamour — his sharp suits, skinny ties (which I soon started emulating), his passion for Porsches. I was 34 and not an architect or a planner, and I was frankly a little scared of him.
At the time, I was reading 'The Leopard,' the novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, which has one line that really struck me: 'If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.' That was the design challenge of the High Line. So many of us had delighted in the wild landscape that had grown up on the railroad after it fell out of use in the 1980s. To make it accessible to the public, we would have to rip out all the wildflowers we loved, install drainage and remove decades of toxic residue.
There was already a famed elevated linear park in Paris, the Promenade Plantée. But with its benches and planters, it was exactly what we didn't want, an ordinary park a few stories up.
Mr. Scofidio and his team gave us something entirely new that was inspired by the abandoned landscape that we'd started with, while not showing off. He would often say, 'My job as an architect is to save the High Line from architecture.' And there were no shortage of big ideas; architecture schools had for decades asked their students to come up with proposals for what to build there. But Mr. Scofidio's team focused on stripping things away and exposing the structure instead of adding to it.
A new walkway system was at the core of their approach. It featured concrete planks that would comb into the landscaping. The walkways could be put together from a kit — planks in different shapes and sizes that could be used in various ways. Newly planted wildflowers would push up between the planks, just as their predecessors did in the gravel ballast of the abandoned tracks. It would almost be like nature trying to reclaim the space.
The High Line was expensive to build, but mostly because of the complex remediation, not the concrete planking system. That wasn't just elegant, it was cost-effective.
Above 18th Street the Scofidio team designed seating above 10th Avenue, making a theater for the watching traffic below. The ramp for wheelchair access became a playground for children.
I get tired every time I climb the stairs to my walk-up apartment. But I never feel tired walking up the various stairways to the High Line. Mr. Scofidio's team designed those stairs and landings just perfectly — giving you a pause in the right places, a moment to rest and appreciate the city. It's the kind of detail no one notices, but everyone feels.
Mr. Scofidio was wildly inventive. I still regret not fighting harder for his proposed glass-walled urinals, which are hard to even describe, but suffice it to say, they were designed in a way that made it look as if their users were watering the grasses growing on the High Line. I also wish we had taken up his proposal for a see-through swimming pool suspended over 14th Street, made of some experimental concrete that he swore would be transparent and also structural.
In a city that quickly moves on to the next big thing, continuously and often irreverently erasing its history, block by block, Mr. Scofidio's contribution to the reimagining of the High Line now feels obvious, something we can all take for granted. Over a hundred projects inspired by the High Line have surfaced all over the world. Many have succeeded on their own terms, but the ones that try to just imitate the High Line don't work.
As Diller Scofidio grew, the firm moved to offices near the High Line, becoming a part of the vast real estate shift its creation unleashed. And it participated: The firm designed the Shed arts center and the high-rise condo building it nests into at the Hudson Yards development at the northern terminus of the High Line. He embraced the contractions that were inherent in the High Line project: hard/soft, nature/steel, park/development. He gave us a theater to watch it all happen, a place that changed the city where you could also watch as the city changed.
I know he didn't love everything that happened around, and because of, the High Line. I remember a discussion not long ago when we were planning to add a bridge from the park across 10th Avenue that would allow an easy path to the Moynihan station train hub. Would as a result the High Line become crowded with commuters in a way that would trammel on its spirit? We argued about it. (The footbridge, which Mr. Scofidio was not involved with the design of in the end, opened in 2023.)
Mr. Scofidio never wanted the High Line to be too, well, pedestrian. He thought of it as a linear path that challenged its visitors to break out of linearity. Walking it, you are both observed and observer, part of something larger than yourself, at once humbled and empowered like only New York City can make you feel.
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