On High, a Fresh Outlook@Arch

People walked along a path in the High Line park, which opened to the public on Tuesday in New York City.

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

Published: June 9, 2009

I keep picturing Carrie Bradshaw on the High Line, and it terrifies me.

Ever since it was unveiled in 2005, the design for this park, conceived for a strip of elevated rail tracks abandoned nearly 30 years ago, has been the favorite cause of New York’s rich and powerful. Celebrities attended fund-raisers on its deck. City officials endorsed it. Developers salivated over it, knowing it would raise land values.

I worried that it would one day be overrun with tourists and film crews. I imagined turning on the television to see Carrie stumbling down its promenade with a broken heel, weeping over Mr. Big. How, I wondered, could it possibly retain the tranquillity that made walking along its rusting, decrepit deck such a haunting experience? So I was overjoyed this weekend when I climbed the stairs at Gansevoort Street, entered the new city park and felt an immediate sense of calm. Designed by James Corner Field Operations with Diller Scofidio & Renfro, the first phase of the High Line, which opened on Tuesday, is a series of low scruffy gardens, punctuated by a fountain and a few quiet lounge areas, that unfold in a lyrical narrative and seem to float above the noise and congestion below. It is one of the most thoughtful, sensitively designed public spaces built in New York in years.

But what’s really unexpected about the park is the degree to which it alters your perspective on the city. Guiding you through a secret landscape of derelict buildings, narrow urban canyons and river views, it allows you to make entirely new visual connections between different parts of Manhattan while maintaining a remarkably intimate relationship with the surrounding streets.

The park, which currently extends as far north as West 20th Street, is conceived as a series of interwoven events, like chapters of a book. Approached from the south along Washington Street in the meatpacking district, its 30-foot-high steel deck, supported on big steel columns and sliced off brutally at one end, makes for a striking contrast with the green, leafy landscape atop it. A street-level entry plaza, paved in concrete, is tucked underneath, and a broad metal staircase, with sleek brushed stainless-steel handrails, leads up to the structure’s underbelly. Rusted Corten steel plates line the opening in the deck’s floor, emphasizing the violence of the cut.

A subtle play between contemporary and historical design, industrial decay and natural beauty sets the tone. The surface of the deck, for example, is made of concrete planks meant to echo the linearity of the old tracks. The path slips left and right as it advances, so that at some points you are right up against the edge of the railing and at others you are enveloped in the gardens.

And those gardens have a wild, ragged look that echoes the character of the old abandoned track bed when it was covered with weeds, just a few years ago. Wildflowers and prairie grasses mix with Amelanchier bushes, their branches speckled with red berries. Mr. Corner designed planters to hold the taller trees, and the Gansevoort entry is marked by a cluster of birches. On Saturday the gardens were swarming with bees, butterflies and birds. I half expected to see Bambi.

Occasionally, you catch a glimpse of a fragment of track lying in the grass, a carefully placed reminder of the High Line’s former life.

What saves all this from becoming a saccharine exercise in nostalgia is the sophistication with which these elements are fused together. The benches, for example, have a sleek contemporary feel; they are made of simple wood slats that lock into the deck’s concrete planks. The lighting, too, is uncommonly subtle. Most of it is embedded in the bottom of the handrails to keep the focus on the plantings and keep glare to a minimum.

As you continue north, the narrative keeps shifting. The park tunnels through an old brick commercial building just above 13th Street; dimly lit, the cavernous space offers an escape from the heat of a sunny day or from a downpour. Farther up, a spur breaks off and dead-ends into another building, creating a more private pocket overgrown with grasses and shrubs. The most original feature is a small amphitheater that angles down from the center of the deck near 17th Street. Sitting on rows of wood benches, visitors can look through an enormous window up the length of 10th Avenue, the cars and taxis roaring out from directly beneath their feet.But as mesmerizing as the design is, it is the height of the High Line that makes it so magical, and that has such a profound effect on how you view the city. Lifted just three stories above the ground, you are suddenly able to perceive, with remarkable clarity, aspects of the city’s character you would never glean from an office window. At some points, billboards and parking structures dominate the foreground. At others, you are directly below the cornice line, so that you seem to be floating among the rooftops.

Longer views open up down narrow side streets to the Hudson, or east across the city.

At the same time, you are still close enough to make eye contact with people on the sidewalks, so that you never lose your connection to the street life. The High Line is the only place in New York where you can have this experience — one that is as singular in its way as standing on the observation deck of the Empire State Building.

None of this would matter if the architects had not struggled so hard to regulate access. It often seemed that almost every developer working in the meatpacking district, at one point or another, was begging to have an apartment building or hotel connect directly to the gardens. Yet remarkably, there are only four access points between Gansevoort and 20th Streets. This adds considerably to the park’s low-key mood, and reinforces the notion that it is a place for a quiet stroll, an escape from the trendy neighborhoods below.

We still need to see what will happen when the High Line gets on the major tourist itineraries. The second phase, extending it up to 30th Street, is set to start construction in a few weeks, which will raise new design questions. And developers are still fighting to build bridges to the gardens from their buildings.

But the care and patience with which this project was developed, both on the part of the architects and the High Line’s founders, Joshua David and Robert Hammond, is a rarity anywhere. They have given New Yorkers an invaluable and transformative gift.

@Source from: http://www.nytimes.com/