The High Line: From Death Avenue to Design Icon

Before there was a High Line, there was Death Avenue.

Tenth Avenue on Manhattan's West Side was, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a working railroad corridor where New York Central freight trains ran at street level. The trains moved slowly through a neighborhood of meatpacking plants, slaughterhouses, and warehouses, and they killed people regularly: pedestrians who misjudged the approach, horses who bolted, children who played on the tracks. The railroad responded to the public-safety crisis by hiring men on horseback, called the West Side Cowboys, to ride ahead of the trains waving red flags. The West Side Cowboys did not actually make Tenth Avenue safe. They just warned people that danger was coming.

In the early nineteen thirties, New York City built the solution: an elevated freight viaduct that lifted the trains above street level for about a mile and a half through the meatpacking district and Chelsea, ending the grade crossings entirely. The last freight train used the viaduct in nineteen eighty. The structure rusted in place for twenty years, unmaintained and inaccessible, while the city repeatedly proposed demolishing it and property owners who held rights beneath it repeatedly disagreed about who bore the demolition costs.

In nineteen ninety-nine, two neighbors named Joshua David and Robert Hammond walked the abandoned viaduct and decided it was worth saving. They founded Friends of the High Line in nineteen ninety-nine. The first section of the public park that resulted opened in two thousand nine.

The High Line is now one of the most visited parks in America. It generates approximately nine hundred million dollars a year in adjacent real estate development. The meatpacking district and Chelsea, neighborhoods that were mixed-income industrial communities when the viaduct was built, are now among the most expensive real estate in the city. The park saved the infrastructure. What the infrastructure then did to the neighborhood is a separate, more complicated story.