The High Line: A Park to Look Up To

by Victoria Tentler-Krylov

Overview

An illustrated history of New York City’s internationally famous High Line, one of the world’s most innovative and inspiring public parks.
 
Imagine a very different New York City—one whose streets are filled with horses and buggies and people on foot. Now imagine the block-long freight trains that shared the same roads delivering goods to the west-side factories. How did New York solve the problem of trains barreling through busy city streets? They built a train track above all the hustle and bustle, and the High Line was born. Once trains were no longer needed to transport goods, the High Line sat abandoned, ready for demolition.
 
But the city had other ideas. The High Line opened as a 1.45-mile-long park in 2009. It quickly became an iconic, must-see attraction and a marvel of landscape architecture, admired worldwide for its history, beauty, and creative union of urban design with greenspace. As the High Line became a global inspiration, longtime residents of the neighborhood surrounding it also advocated to keep the park feeling like home.
 
Packed with facts and gorgeous watercolor illustrations by Victoria Tentler-Krylov, The High Line: A Park to Look Up To is the story of an innovative idea and the people who made it possible—from the ingenuity of those who first built it for the needs of industry, to those who reimagined it as a community space for art, recreation, and the preservation of nature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781647004033
Publisher:	Abrams
Publication date:	05/02/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	40
File size:	26 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.
Age Range:	4 - 8 Years

About the Author

Victoria Tentler-Krylov is a trained and practicing architect, as well as a children’s and editorial illustrator, who grew up in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and studied architecture and urban design at Cooper Union and Columbia University. Her inspiration is fueled by urban landscapes but also by fantasy, possibility, and imagination. Her other passion is experimenting with digital and traditional art tools, and in particular, pushing the boundaries of watercolor digitally. Building Zaha: The Story of Architect Zaha Hadid was her author-illustrated debut, and her illustrated picture books include We Are a Garden, The Cyclops of Central Park, Just Read!, and Peter Pan: A Modern Retelling. She lives with her family just outside Boston.

Editorial Reviews

2023-01-25
A short history of the elevated park constructed along an abandoned rail line in New York City.

Showing her background as an architect, Tentler-Krylov tells a tale that is more about structures, purposes, and visionary design features than people—though both leading figures in the still-ongoing enterprise and local residents in the affected neighborhoods do receive due attention, particularly in the substantial afterword. If the resulting narrative may seem a bit abstract to younger readers, it nonetheless documents a real triumph of urban renewal and innovative land use. Readers learn how tracks built to carry trainloads of supplies right into factories on Manhattan’s lower West Side were abandoned to weeds and weather until a group of concerned citizens envisioned a place where “trees and flowers would bloom overhead, and new cafés and art galleries would sprout on the streets below.” (Gentrification is touched on briefly in the narrative and more so in the backmatter.) Saved from demolition and turned section by section into a greenway with places to walk, sit, see art, and look out over the streets below, the High Line has sparked an economic boom for the area and inspired similar reclamatory projects in other large cities. In the bright, stylish watercolors, diverse crowds of figures work and socialize both on bustling city streets and, later, on swooping pathways amid abundant carpets of well-kept wildflowers and grassy swards. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A vibrant, if somewhat formalized, tribute. (timeline, bibliography) (Informational picture book. 7-10)

Kirkus Reviews