Mark Alan Hughes: High concept on the High Line
The High Line is a Depression-era elevated rail freight line that runs for almost a mile and a half above street-level and along and through buildings in a part of lower Manhattan that once bustled with factories and warehouses. Active for about 50 years, the steel viaduct was abandoned by the 1980s and became an overgrown secret garden for graffiti artists and urban explorers.
The High Line is a Depression-era elevated rail freight line that runs for almost a mile and a half above street-level and along and through buildings in a part of lower Manhattan that once bustled with factories and warehouses. Active for about 50 years, the steel viaduct was abandoned by the 1980s and became an overgrown secret garden for graffiti artists and urban explorers.
In the last decade, that heady New York mix of citizens and celebrities came together to raise awareness and cash to save the High Line, which was threatened with demolition. More than $150 million has been raised. Five years ago, landscape architect James Corner's Field Operations - in partnership with architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro and planting designer Piet Oudolf - won a competition for a design to save the line. (Corner is also a finalist in the competition here to create a master plan for the Central Delaware.)
This summer, the first eight blocks of the High Line opened to the public. Corner's inspired design idea was to preserve the essential quality that had evoked all that love in the first place: a self-seeded meadow growing on an abandoned piece of industrial detritus just enough removed from the surrounding city that visitors feel a sense of discovery and repose.
Lisa Switkin is the project lead for Field Operations for the entire five years of development, which is actually a fast-track for a big public project like this. For Switkin, the critical phase of the project was the beginning when everyone debated what the High Line is: A building? A road? An air-right for development? A piece of abandoned equipment?
That debate matters. For example, the city's Department of Transportation thought of the High Line as an elevated railway crossing streets. Pretty reasonable. But if that's the category, then regulation from the feds on down requires things like eight-foot barriers on the viaduct once pedestrians are allowed on it.
But eventually the High Line was defined as a park and everything else unfolded from there: from the design (the High Line has limited access and no bikes, slowing the pace from the streets below) to the budget (an endowment to support ongoing maintenance) to the regulation.
Perhaps the most creative act in the whole story was this redefinition. We're about to be bombarded with proposals to recycle abandoned elevated railways into parks, from a line around Paris to our own Reading viaduct north of Vine. But the real lesson isn't copy-machine imitation of a very specific design idea.
Instead, the High Line teaches us an important lesson about how to repurpose old cities in new centuries. And the most important place in Philadelphia to use that lesson is not the Reading Viaduct. It's our still under-managed and overwhelming inventory of vacant land.
What is vacant land? Blight? A development parcel? A farm? Is it a way to manage storm water or generate energy? A way to grow or shrink? A combination or a portfolio of all these things?
AT A KEY moment in the story, Mayor Bloomberg made it clear that the High Line was no longer an elevated rail line but a linear park. That leadership moment had consequences that made all else possible.
We need the same decisive consolidation of public authority related to vacant land. Nothing is more basic to a city than land: How it's assessed, regulated, occupied. Nothing is more directly under local control than land use.
The High Line transformed how New Yorkers see and think and live in Chelsea. What happened there is a guide for what we can do throughout Philadelphia by changing vacant land from liability to asset.
Mark Alan Hughes teaches at PennDesign and the TC Chan Center for Energy Studies. E-mail