PREVIEW: Great Museums: Elevated Thinking: The High Line in New York City

I don't think either Robert or I could have ever really imagined anything quite as wonderful as what the High Line has become. You know, we just thought, wow, you have a mile and a half in Manhattan. Why rush to tear it down? Let's think about what else it can be. What else can you do with it? Recycled from a defunct elevated railway, the High Line is a fantastic world of woodlands, thickets, prairies and meadows floating 30 feet in the air through 22 blocks of New York City. It is at once a monument to a bygone era and the centerpiece of a revitalized West Side. The High Line is all about being in the city. It's an escape, but it's not an escape from the city. It's an escape from your normal experience of the city. It's about reconnecting with the city from a completely new vantage point. So you're moving through the city in a new way and seeing the city in a new way. You can see the Statue of Liberty looking one way. You can see the Empire State Building looking the other. It is a mile and a half long line that's a lot like a gallery in a museum, if you will, that allows you to experience the city in an extraordinary way where the city is now the exhibit. Like the railroad it replaced, the new park rises above busy streets and runs in one side of buildings and out the other as it winds its way from the historic meatpacking neighborhood through Chelsea to Hell's Kitchen. The whole experience is magical. It's slightly elevated, but not too high. So it protects you from the street, but yet you feel the energy of the street. And also you're near the water. You really are parallel to the river. That also adds yet another dimension and another sense of air and space and hope and freedom and all the things we like. The High Line is an Art Deco masterpiece of industrial design. Massive yet elegant, its style is defined by the geometric patterns of the guardrails wherever it bridges a street. The way the High Line is constructed is constructed out of layers of steel. And there are millions of rivets, hundreds of thousands of rivets, which is an amazing piece of engineering and construction. After the last train ran in 1980, the High Line sat neglected for nearly two decades. Finally, it was slated for demolition. But locals Robert Hammond and Joshua David didn't want to see it go. To save it from the wrecking ball, they formed Friends of the High Line in 1999. We both fell in love with the High Line first viewing it from the street. We never saw what was on top of it. But then when I walked up here for the first time in the summer of 99, there was a mile and a half of wildflowers growing up. I mean, literally, we're having to wade through waist-high where these white flowers that were blooming. And when that vista opened up, it was just this huge, incredibly beautiful piece of open space that's a block away from my house that has been here all the time that I've lived in New York, and I never even knew it was here. The High Line changed me the moment that I saw it. This incredible old piece of urban infrastructure had turned into a magical garden in the sky. And how brilliant of both Josh and Robert to get an incredible photographer to take pictures of what it looked like up there so that everybody could see that this was a magical place, a wild, dynamic landscape. When I went up on the High Line with Robert and Josh on that cold March morning, it didn't look like much at all, but I'd spent my whole artistic life following the seasons, and I knew that in a month or two it would bloom. CSX Transportation, the owner of the High Line, gave Joel Sternfeld permission to photograph on the railroad for a year. And in May, it was like being in a meadow in the Alps. And Memorial Day weekend, the city was empty, and I was alone on the High Line photographing the Starrett-Lehigh building. And I realized I'd rather be here than any place in the world. And this is that same spring. People look at this and they think that I've done something digitally, and I haven't. This is just how the High Line looked that year. You know, I said there wasn't a picture that was my favorite, but this is it. That little lavender-purple color is so subtle, so delicate, and that touch of green there. Every time I walked by it, and there was that little tinge of purple heather, my heart just skipped a beat. I just loved it. Joel Sternfeld's evocative photographs ignited the campaign to save the High Line. Joel's images were the images we always used when we were saying the High Line should be preserved, the High Line needs to be saved, don't tear the High Line down. In time, New Yorkers fell in love with Sternfeld's images of the wildscape growing on the derelict railway. My wife called me. She was in Chelsea. And she said, you've got to come up here and see the High Line. And I went up there. And people were stretched out in the chaise lounges. They could have been in their own backyards. They were in that invisible bubble that New Yorkers create around themselves. Relaxing and talking and doing things as if no one was there, even though a thousand people an hour were walking by them. So I think it's real New York Park. It's a real bit of New York.