It seems like it’s been raining forever in New York, but recently, the showers stopped long enough for me to try out the city’s latest amenity: The High Line park running along Tenth Avenue. Rising 30 feet into the air, the park has been created out of an old railway trestle built in the 1930s to carry freight from the old Pennsylvania Yards on West 34th Street to the Meatpacking district laying 1.45 miles to the south. In its current configuration, the park, which takes its cues from a similar project in Paris called the Promenade Plantée, extends nine blocks, from Gansevoort Street to West 17th street; eventually, it will continue north as West 30th Street, if not all the way to Javits Center.

I must confess here that my visit was motivated by more than just civic curiosity. In the 1980s, I used to work near the High Line, back when it was an abandoned stretch of rusting steel, sheltering transexual hookers as they plied their trade to motorists heading for the Lincoln Tunnel. I’d often stop to admire its poetry of riveted steel, wondering what the view from up there must be like. Later, in the early ’90s, news that then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani wanted to tear the High Line down was quit upsetting to me, as I’d assumed something of a proprietary interest in it. I was just as relieved a few years later when a group of concerned citizens, inspired in part by photographer Joel Sternfeld’s wonderful book, Walking The High Line, rallied to save the structure, and convince the newly elected mayor, Michael Bloomberg to transform it into its current form. read more