Eleven years ago, my friend Sean penned an audacious op-ed for the New York Times — he was able to do those things — in advance of the opening of the much-feted High Line. In his article, he took the planners to task for their comparatively banal designs to transform the long-derelict strip of elevated railway into a public park. Sean had more lofty ideas, although few of them seemed especially likely — let alone practical — but such was Sean’s perspective on the world. Personally speaking, my biggest grievance with the High Line was that I’d never been bold enough to venture onto in during its less accessible iteration as a forbidding artifact of urban abandonment, tangled with wild overgrowth and street art. I’d had friends who’d done it, but I’d always wimped out.
Regardless, the High Line opened amid much fanfare and congratulatory backslapping in 2009. Touted as some kind of blow against the empire, the opening of the public park was seemingly perceived as a bold defense of art, beauty and history — a lovingly cultivated green space born of the obsolescence of a vanished industrial age. Enabling its visitors to reclaim the vestiges of an outdated era, one of the primary purposes of the ambitious re-imagined space — or so I was led to believe — was to provide new vantage points with which to view the surrounding city. Much Like Robin Williams’ rapturous lecture on the value of different perspective in “Dead Poets Society,” the core of the High Line’s original mission was to allow its visitors to experience the surrounding environs in a whole new way.
My children were still relatively tiny tots when the High Line opened, so — as detailed in this ancient post — I dutifully took them to the High Line for a look around. Indeed, it was a fun new spot for them to explore.
It’s funny how fast things change.
Ten years later, the High Line is essentially a complete atrocity. As Justin Davidson rightly pointed out in a recent article for New York Magazine, all the initial attractions of the High Line — that rarified new perspective on the surrounding sprawl, that placid green space of tranquility amid the hoopla, that reverent intermingling of the city’s past with the city’s present — have been basically reduced to a pack of fanciful lies.
In very short order, real estate developers seized upon the long-fallow opportunities the High Line enabled and almost set about ruining everything that was promising about the project from the get-go. Arguably ringing in a prurient new era of architectural voyeurism, buildings started sprouting up around the High Line with an accent on avaricious exhibitionism. High Line visitors were essentially invited to openly gawk into the vast windows of plush hotel rooms and sweeping, extravagantly appointed private apartments. This aesthetic was conceivably kickstarted by the Standard Hotel at the southern end that — it has been suggested — encouraged its guests to engage in panstless sexytime in full view of the park beneath, a trend that was swiftly adopted by the veritable emerald city of structures that sprang up like a gaggle of erections — sorry — in very short order. One or two buildings has since turned into a lustily impersonal gang-bang of wanton development, brazenly altering the cityscape the High Line was ostensibly supposed to complement.
To walk the High Ling now is simply to gaze at countless, prohibitively expensive living spaces that are either still in the throes of tireless construction or are finished but strikingly, noticeably vacant of any signs of life. Try to find a spot to stand there for a few minutes undisturbed (no easy feat), and you’re doubtless to hear someone exclaim something to the effect of “Who would want to live in an apartment on full display all the time?” It’s an entirely fair question, and one that sort of answers itself when you search for its willing participants.
Taking that a step back, however, “to walk the High Line” itself in any capacity has become a joyless chore. Like the wait for an overhyped ride at an amusement park, traversing the length of the High Line — in either direction — is all anticipation and zero fruition. There is no payoff. One is herded through it in a glum exodus of corpulent human cattle, waddling though vulgar monuments to the affluent. I cannot imagine why anyone — be they native Manhattanites or born-&-bred Pataskala, Ohio buckeyes — would derive any pleasure from the experience. But dutifully, they still come in hordes.
But beyond the High Line itself being ruined, the public park has played a greater role as ruiner.
The surrounding neighborhoods the High Line weaves through have all been affected, and rarely for the better. Longtime residents have been driven out by the escalating rents, and age-old businesses, landmarks, institutions and neighborhood favorites have been swiftly and mercilessly extinguished. Like a delicate eco-system grappling with the introduction of a virulent new species, large swathes of the Meatpacking District and Chelsea are wholly unrecognizable today, “re-booted” as uber exclusive enclaves.
My son and I found ourselves on the High Line on Saturday, naively thinking it was early enough to beat the crowds and that we’d be able to make our way downtown in a more direct manner. Suffice to say, we were laughably mistaken in that assumption. Much like finding oneself in the middle of Times Square, the experience was such a deeply irritating headache that I doubt I’ll ever voluntarily return.
Fuck the High Line.
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