Read an Excerpt
When I first stepped up on the High Line in 1999, I truly fell in love. What I fell in love with was the tension. It was there in the juxtaposition between the hard and the soft, the wild grasses and billboards, the industrial relics and natural landscape, the views of both wildflowers and the Empire State Building. It was ugly and beautiful at the same time. And it’s that tension that gives the High Line its power. Joshua David and I founded Friends of the High Line to try to share that magic. At first we just wanted to keep the space exactly as it was. We would leave all of the plants in place and simply put a path down the railway. It would have been a completely wild garden. That turned out not to be feasible. We had to remediate the structure, removing lead paint and putting in new drainage. This meant we had to take up everything—the rails as well as all of the plants. So we had to find a new way. We were not architects or planners. We thought New Yorkers should have a say in what happens on the High Line, so we asked the public for their ideas at a series of community input sessions. At one of these sessions, I received a card that said, “The High Line should be preserved, untouched, as a wilderness area. No doubt you will ruin it. So it goes.” I kept that card posted above my desk. Because that has always been my biggest fear. That we couldn’t capture that naturalistic beauty in its wild state. That we would ruin it. What New Yorkers fell in love with was a series of photographs by Joel Sternfeld taken on the High Line between 1999 and 2000. These images gave many New Yorkers their first glimpses of that hidden wilderness and helped to catapult the movement to open it as a public space. Just one glimpse of Joel’s photography conveys the tension that we wanted in the reconstruction. With that image in mind, we hosted a design competition, looking for visionaries with more experience and talent than us who could conceive and carry out what the space called for—something as unexpected as the original. And we finally saw it again in the design that James Corner Field Operations, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and Piet Oudolf created. Drawing on the dynamic community of plants that had crowded the High Line for decades, the team designed a totally new experience that captured the soul of the space. Other designs we received were either very architectural or tried to exactly recreate the original wild landscape. Neither of those concepts were right. A strictly architectural approach would certainly have sacrificed the magic of the wilderness. The opposite idea, of putting all of the wild plants back “exactly” as they had been, though logical at first glance, was too logical. We felt that approach would anesthetize the final effect. It would be like a wax museum of the old elevated tracks. At the time, I was reading Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard and was struck by the quote, “Everything must change so that everything can stay the same.” And that’s what this design team did. They didn’t try to put something new on the High Line and didn’t try to slavishly recreate what was up there before. They created an all-new magic that captured what Josh and I and so many others had fallen in love with. The High Line of today is not the abandoned field of wildflowers we saw in 1999. It has a new tension. You can see it, in part, in the fact that it is a hybrid space, built on contra- dictions: it’s an art museum on an industrial structure. It’s a community space running a mile and a half through several neighborhoods. It’s a botanical garden suspended over city streets. Unlike Central Park, it’s an immersion in the city, not an escape from it. But what I’m most often struck by is how clearly that original tension is captured within Piet Oudolf’s planting designs. Breaking design tradition, Piet envisioned a multi- season garden of perennials, where the skeletons of plants have as much a part in the landscape as new growth. Throughout the year, tall grasses and reaching flowers grow and fall back like tides. The winter garden is as powerful as the summer, with the texture provided by dry stalks and seedheads. The brown plants against new growth echo the larger contradictions of the High Line: the wilderness in the city, the art museum on a train track. Like the park itself, the gardens hover between beauty and decay. In many ways, today’s High Line plantings are more dynamic than the plants they replaced. On the old tracks, the plants changed gradually through the seasons. In contrast, the High Line gardens change every week. They are filled with native and introduced, drought-tolerant perennials that behave as wildly as their forebearers did. These plants thrive and spread, trying to take over more than their originally allotted space. This constant change, the tension between beauty and decay, is akin to the energy that drives New York. Like our city, the gardens reveal a dichotomy that becomes a force of inspiration. And people react to it in unexpected ways. Like using it for dating apps. One of our staff members collected profile photos taken on the High Line for the popular hook-up app for gay men, Grindr. Why do Grindr users choose this backdrop? Like Joel Sternfeld, they see haunting romance and excitement in the contrasts. It’s perfect for a clandestine encounter. It’s beautiful but still urban not suburban. For maybe slightly different reasons, it’s also very popular for engagement photos. It takes a special kind of gardener, with an artist’s eye, to maintain the tension of the High Line. Other designers have a rigid view of how their visions should be tended. But Piet’s openness to change and the freedom he gives to the plants elevate gardening on the High Line to an art form. It requires an incredibly dedicated level of stewardship as well. Just like a minimalist building is harder to design and keep-up than it looks, the gardens require much more care than their wild, natural-looking abundance suggests. For this reason especially, Friends of the High Line is deeply grateful to our members and donors, as their support makes tending to this complex wildness possible. When people talk about the High Line they talk about the plants, but they also talk about the crowds. One might think I’d look back fondly on the time when I could walk up on the High Line alone. But it’s better with people. Josh and I talked about this effect when it opened: it was the people within this landscape that kept it alive, that kept it from being a sterile botanical garden. The people are as important as the perennials. We create a new kind of tension. Before it was restored, the High Line was a spontaneous wonder. Today, it’s something more. The untouched landscape we saw, covered with wildflowers, was surreal. The High Line today is incredible—it’s a botanic garden, a central plaza, an art museum, a cultural center and an evolution of the wonder that was hidden in the middle of Chelsea for decades. It’s always free. It is a living, changing space where anyone can experience that irresistible tension. And that, even more than wildflowers in the city, is something I never thought could be possible.
