High Line Park: Walking above the West Side in New York

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In the mid-1930s the city of New York decided something must be done about the number of citizens who were finding themselves on the losing side of close encounters with the freight trains chugging through the west side of Manhattan. Commerce was one thing, but running your customers down with trains as they were trying to cross the street was another. So the city spent an immense amount of money building some 13 miles of new track. Most of the track was elevated and ran through the centers of the blocks rather than over the streets. And not only that, but the track ran straight through warehouses and factories where the trains could be easily loaded and unloaded.

The last train ran in 1980, pulling three carloads of frozen turkeys, and after the rails began to rust, pressure grew from local landowners to tear down the elevateds. But a group of people from the neighborhood called Friends of the High Line pushed back, and the result is one of the most unusual, beautiful, and surprising bits of open landscape in New York.