Thirty feet up on a freight viaduct that carried its last train in 1980 and then grew a meadow on its own. Concrete planks finger into Oudolf's grasses, the old rails are still in the deck, the traffic runs underneath, and the buildings press in so close on both sides that their brick is the wall the works hang on.
The High Line opened in 1934 as an elevated freight railroad along Manhattan's west side. The last train ran in 1980. Joshua David and Robert Hammond founded Friends of the High Line in 1999 to save it. The first section of the park opened in 2009, designed by James Corner Field Operations, Diller Scofidio and Renfro, and the planting designer Piet Oudolf.
Source · Friends of the High Line ↗
The tapered concrete planks fingering into the planting, the original rails and ties left in the deck, the peel up benches, the sundeck chairs on their rails, the Tenth Avenue Square cut down into the deck with its window over the traffic, a hotel straddling the line, water towers and fire escapes, and the grasses. Mood: late afternoon. Everything is procedural geometry with painted surfaces; nothing is a scan or a photograph. The room is an interpretation, and it hangs the New Yorkers the census recorded at this place first.