The civic and aesthetic marvel of the High Line never gets old, which is strange. Everything else does. My recent umpteenth stroll in the skinny park—along its finally completed, nearly mile-and-a-half course, from a southern promontory above sleepy Gansevoort Street to a sloping descent onto no-nonsense Thirty-fourth—felt as much like an inaugural tour as my first, five years ago. Average speed a notch above one mile per hour, with pauses to relish the gardens, the city and river views, and the vignettes of human comedy. Foot-traffic congestion forbade striding, even on a Monday afternoon under a rain-pregnant sky. People love the High Line, albeit with discernible self-consciousness, which I share: Do we love it in the right way? It’s perfect. Perfection chagrins.
Controversy increasingly afflicts the High Line, with undertones of class and inter-borough animus. Our Brooklynite Mayor, Bill de Blasio, a no-show at the recent opening of the northern segment, has made no apology for never having visited the park. And Anthony Weiner relayed to Twitter his low opinion of it: “How do you spell ‘meh?’ ” ("Meh"! Really? Of course, Weiner has evinced special notions of “wow!”) The flash point is a naked consummation of the conquest of Manhattan by real-estate imperialism. As a catalyst of neighborhood change, the High Line has been to usual gentrification what a bomb is to bottle rockets. Giant new apartment buildings and swanky renovations cuddle up to its flanks, having routed tenants and businesses of middling means. But I see no virtue, let alone a remedy, in refusing to enjoy a place that is free and open to all, and terrific.
The High Line’s persistent novelty, for me, surely owes to my unfamiliarity with its major precedent, the transformed rail line called the promenade plantée, in Paris, and with related projects in other cities. (But isn’t new-to-New York newness a singular charm?) Groping for analogies, I observe that the remnant train tracks, either flush with paving stones or skulking beneath vegetation, lend an air of enterable Surrealist painting, a de Chirico or Magritte, with perfunctory human figures added for scale. In the interest of shuddery giggles, the High Line’s public-art component might include the periodic warning blast of a locomotive whistle.
The High Line, incidentally, provides an ideal platform for public art that importunes without annoying—unlike most of its kind today, which tends to fail as civic symbolism or as art, if not both. I sense an extrusion, noodle-like, of a mood of ambulatory viewership from the hundreds of Chelsea art galleries that the park overflies. Recent, and best of the works so far, is a big Ed Ruscha word mural that reads, with block letters dropped out in sunset rose-red, “HONEY, I TWISTED THROUGH MORE DAMN TRAFFIC TODAY.” It feels like a genial cross-continental salute from the freeways of the artist’s Los Angeles to New York’s huddled pedestrians.
O.K., the new part. It kicks in at Thirtieth Street with a sharp left turn, as if by ricochet from a particularly humongous new building that is under construction. The path switches from stone to black gravel underfoot—a temporary expedient, pending an eventual upgrade—as it hooks to the right along West Street and then slopes to the east**,** ending at a bus stop, a splashdown into the ordinary. Surrounding this segment is an unfolding urban epic: the already begun but still mostly incipient development of the West Side rail yards. You can almost make out, in the air, ghostly lines of architects’ plans. For a few years, we can regularly sample evolving vistas of what the artist Robert Smithson called construction sites: “ruins in reverse.”
A beholder of midtown from the High Line’s unaccustomed perspective may recall another catchphrase, the Sinatran “be a part of it”—denoting Manhattan while leaving connotations open. “It” tingles with intimations of a destiny reachable by bridge or tunnel and a quotient of E. B. White’s requirement for arrivers here, “a willingness to be lucky.” (Key a little Gershwin.) For many, if not most, who would once have embraced it, the mandate is receding behind an effective paywall. But embitterment can wait. The High Line is really something, like the city. Each of us there is somebody, parading at ease.
