NYC High Line
Over the past two decades, New York City has been slowly transforming itself into an even more liveable place with an emphasis on green space and urban food production. One of the City’s most amazing projects (perhaps one of the most amazing projects in any urban environment of the past decade) is the High Line Project.
Diversity At The NYC High Line
The High Line Garden sprang from the dreams of a group of visionary neighborhood activists who worked as tenaciously as a pimpernel in a sidewalk crack to raise money, receive permits, design, and execute this extraordinary public space. The High Line is reviving the spirits or ordinary New Yorkers and millions of tourists who visit the city every year, as well as the vitality of the surrounding neighborhoods. Native and climate-appropriate plants attract insects, birds, and curious onlookers.
Laputa or High Line?
Truly a castle in the sky, reminiscent of something out of Gulliver’s Travels or more recently, Hayao Miyazaki’s Laputa, the High Line is suspended above the streets and din of New York. Trees and shrubs, grasses and flowering perennials welcome, shade, and embrace you as you explore this mini magical kingdom above it ALL.
The garden is structured more like a green roof than traditional garden, and some of the green infrastructure is visible to the naked eye, including struts for staking the larger trees, an in-line drip irrigation system, and eco-pave walkway grid similar to that used by G3 at both the Sucher Residence OFG and West Basin’s Edward C. Little WRF OFG Demonstration Garden. The plants are installed in a gravel or decomposed granite area and mulched with gravel.
Much of the older planting (it has been done in phases) has created a living mulch as the grasses, perennials, and shrubs have grown into each other. It will be interesting to see how the plant material responds over time to not having any organic matter as mulch. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the High Line is the ways in which people on the High Line are encouraged to interact with each other and with the street below. Benches, some rolling or connectable with one another, are placed at regular intervals and are wonderfully suited for lounging around on a lunch hour or taking a brief afternoon siesta. An amphitheater descends from the High Line walkway to reveal a huge glassed-in overpass through which seated High Line visitors can watch the traffic on the street below. Many windows of the adjacent skyscrapers are devoid of window treatments, creating a mutually voyeuristic experience — a glimpse into the details of how truly urban dwellers experience their space.
NYC High Line Views
The High Line is an out-of-the-box example of Green Infrastructure that should be applied in EVERY urban setting across the country.
