In October 2018 I went to visit Manhattan’s High Line, a mile-long elevated park that was developed over the last decade out of a closed-down freight line stretching from West Fourteenth Street to West Thirty-Fourth Street. It was one of those New York fall evenings when you realize that winter is coming. By 6:30 it was already becoming dark, and there was the proverbial nip in the air.
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This was also the magic hour, the time of optimal light for photographers: as the sunlight faded, the lights inside the surrounding buildings came on, outlining each structure in a glow from both inside and out, letting you see life extending from the streets through the bedrooms, living rooms, offices, and restaurants beyond the glass panes. It was the kind of time and place that could make you fall in the love with the city, and at the same time break your heart as you sensed the toil and the loneliness behind and in front of the facades.
I mounted the steps of the High Line until I was three floors above the street. As I stepped onto the deck laid over the old train tracks, I found myself surrounded on each side by singers, their faces glowing underneath caps with built-in lights. They were part of The Mile-Long Opera, an event put together by architect Elizabeth Diller and her firm, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, in collaboration with the composer David Lang and the poets Anne Carson and Claudia Rankine. “I’m walking toward what is mute. A neutrality of silences,” the first group intoned. “Silence exists as an object that enables,” they continued.
The lines seemed a bit grand and abstract, but as I shuffled on, another story appeared: “She imagines she is walking toward a noisy dinner party, but, more often than not, it’s dinner for one; it’s just her sitting in her unbuttoned coat in the chair closest to the kitchen, eating the whitest plate and reading realty not reality.” I instinctively turned away from them toward one of the apartment buildings surrounding the elevated walkway, expecting to see the subject of the song perusing the papers for better living quarters.
It was the kind of time and place that could make you fall in the love with the city, and at the same time break your heart.
As I moved farther down the High Line, the story kept changing and evolving. The table on which the woman was eating was described in more detail: “It was my grandmother’s and I moved it from Elkhart to Minneapolis.” The song traced the table’s movement from the Midwest to Boston and then to New York. Along the way, the table was refinished and got new legs. Other tables appeared in the lyrics, some fancy and made of mahogany, others purchased from Ikea. The song touched on places from the Deep South to Slovenia. Other characters in the opera also moved in and out of focus, or so I thought; every time I stopped and listened carefully, there was really only one voice of one hybrid subject, all by itself, alone in their apartment and the city that was slowly settling in for the night around us.
Every time I stopped and looked at one of the singers, they would turn directly to address me, enhancing the sense that I was listening to one person’s story. Then I would turn away and see the line of singers awaiting me ahead. I would catch shards of the story’s next installment, and the lone singer and I would turn away from each other as I moved on. Beyond the singers, I would sometimes glimpse apartments that were more fully lit and see somebody standing there, staring out at space. In other apartments, window washers kept wiping the same pane over and over again. I realized the performance extended beyond the High Line.
Over the course of two hours, I walked the full mile of the park’s linear space, then down the curving path around the towers of the new Hudson Yards development, a cluster of glass-sheathed towers then just beginning to rise over the Penn Station railyards. As the space opened up, allowing you to look one way to the Hudson River and the other way toward the city skyline, the opera became louder, grander, and more abstract: “Whatever can happen to anyone can happen to us, whatever can happen to a city can happen to this city,” the singers chanted. “The sleeping, the forgetting, the wrecking, the towering, the kissing, the scoffing, the cellophaning, the whirling snow, the sane and insane.” They listed events small and large, from the applying of lipstick to “the rushing plenitudes,” before ending with words that evoked two of New York’s greatest writers, Walt Whitman and F. Scott Fitzgerald: “The silence after living…onward rolls the broad bright current.” As I moved past the last singer, I gazed at the Manhattan skyline one last time. Then I descended a still makeshift staircase, made my way past the bus terminal, and immersed myself again in the real city.
The Mile-Long Opera was a completely ephemeral event, though one that involved a great deal of logistics. It enlisted over a thousand singers from choirs all across New York to stand along the length of the High Line, and it organized the performances so that the piece began at 7 p.m. every evening of the opera’s run—its subtitle was “a biography of 7 o’clock”—and descended into darkness two hours later. Along the way, the Mile-Long Opera sang life into the High Line and, with it, New York. It was the fullest embodiment of what that piece of landscape architecture had been able to achieve since its first section opened in 2009.
From a more brass-tacks perspective, the High Line has also been one of the most successful acts of value creation in the history of real estate. With an investment from donors and various governments totaling several hundred million dollars over the ten-year period it took to build all its sections, its construction unlocked close to fifteen billion dollars’ worth of value: what had been an obscure part of the city was suddenly at the center of New York’s cultural and commercial life. This formerly industrial part of Manhattan now attracted tenants to old buildings that quickly became co-ops and condos, and at least two dozen new towers were erected next to the High Line. The park draws about two million people a year, making it one of New York’s most popular attractions. The western reach of Fourteenth Street at the park’s southern end became a veritable high-end shopping mall, anchored by the Whitney Museum of American Art, which moved there from its old Upper East Side location at least in part because of the High Line.
This was, of course, not an altogether good thing from a social and economic perspective. Although the area had already been gentrifying before construction on the park started, it had still been home to many lower-income immigrants. One of the last diverse areas of Manhattan has since been washed away by a tide of multimillion-dollar apartments. As I walked the opera, I was briefly distracted by a group of what looked like frat bros having a party on their terrace, ostentatiously swinging around champagne bottles. What was once a working freight line had mainlined venture capital and tech dividends into the heart of New York.
The High Line, in other words, shows how reuse can unlock possibilities in both good and bad ways. On the one hand, it lets us experience the city in a whole new way and converts what had been a garbage-filled, abandoned track into an active public space. On the other hand, it has been the most efficient and effective tool of gentrification possible. These two outcomes, which are completely intertwined, are intrinsic to all the kinds of imaginative reuse that I have been describing, but their effects are particularly amplified in the case of reused transportation infrastructure. Around the world, converted railroad lines, canals, and even highways have become the prime movers of urban regeneration and reimagination. What were once industrial areas have turned into havens for tech companies, tech workers, hipsters, highly educated operators of symbolic logic (as political commentator Robert Reich would have it), and centers for shopping and socializing—all by doing no more than by opening and redesigning already existing spaces.
The High Line is the epitome of this. Previous attempts to provide new public spaces in Manhattan had yielded mixed results, with the changes to the West Side Highway that runs parallel to the High Line only a block away as a prime example. In 2001, after many proposals to tear down still-busy elevated road, the section below Fifty-Ninth street was finally removed. Many had hoped the site would become a giant linear park and a new way to bring waterfront access to Manhattanites. The road remains—albeit now a formidable, eight-lane barrier at ground level—and the few developments along the waterfront, though successful, have not transformed the area.
Beyond the lives going on behind those windows, you can also see what previous lives have built.
By comparison, the presence of the unused freight line in the middle of the city seemed to many like nothing more than a minor nuisance. After the last trains stopped running on it in 1980s, less than fifty years after the line was erected, it was assumed that it would be eventually torn down. Then the usual pioneers of taggers, drug users, partying kids, hard sleepers, and a few photographers discovered the beauty of this overgrown linear oasis. They began arguing for its preservation. In 1999 the railroad company that had inherited the line, CSX, offered to donate the facility to whomever could take care of it. A nonprofit raised the money for the project, organized a competition for redevelopment proposals, and in 2006 selected Diller Scofidio + Renfro, together with the landscape architect James Corner, to design the new park.
The designers won the commission because of the balance they proposed between preserving what was there, bringing back a sense of what had been there in the past, and creating moments that were new and unexpected. They worked with plant specialist Piet Oudolf to bring back some of the native vegetation that might have once flourished on the site but also to encourage some of the blow-ins (vegetation that had come to the site from the local neighborhood).
New wood and metal walkways now thread between the tracks, making it easier to navigate the space, and turning up into vertical and then horizontal planes to become benches along the way. The original structure is still there, with new railings, supports, and stairs—all designed to be modern versions of the old structure and carried out in the same materials and modes of attachment. Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Corner kept these new interventions to a bare minimum—as is the case with the best imaginative forms of reuse—and were careful to preserve as many of the layers of use and patina of the old elevated line as they could.
What makes all this successful is the simple condition of the park being raised above the ground and located in the middle of the city. It is sails over the streets below, arcing away from the Manhattan grid, leading your eye all the way to the Hudson River. Meanwhile, all around you are buildings that you view at mid-level, confronting you with their scenes from everyday life.
There is, as the opera articulated, a certain amount of voyeurism at play here, but beyond the lives going on behind those windows, you can also see what previous lives have built—there are hints in the bricks, panels, windows, cornices, and all the other details of construction around you. Finally, there is that sense of continuity. The space leads you ever on, distracting you at times with its views or the many performances it hosts or the people on benches, but always beckoning you into further spaces.
The moments where the High Line really sings, even when there is no opera or street performance going on, is when it literally cuts through buildings. The cuts lead you into a cave where goods were once unloaded from the tracks inside the buildings they served, where graffiti remains, and where you can stop and rest. Then there is a moment where the wood planks veer off toward the east, step down, and form a small theater. Sit on the tiers and you find yourself watching the performance of cars whizzing by on Tenth Avenue below, in the never-ending automotive ballet of Manhattan.
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Excerpted from Don’t Build, Rebuild: The Case for Imaginative Reuse in Architecture by Aaron Betsky. Copyright © 2024. Excerpted with permission by Beacon Press.