The High Line: A Question Disguised as a Park

The High Line is a deceptively easy walk. A mile and a half of elevated park, planted to look spontaneously wild, with sightlines down 10th Avenue and out over the Hudson. A sunny Sunday will deliver the sensation of having found a kind of secret. The sensation is genuine. The walk is also the literal physical evidence in a still-running argument about how American cities should pay for their futures, and whose neighborhoods get reshaped when the bill comes due. The park hides the question well. The longer the question sits with you, the harder it is to walk away from.

The line nobody wanted

The viaduct itself dates from 1929 to 1934. It was built by the New York Central Railroad to lift freight trains off Manhattan's "Death Avenue" (Tenth Avenue, on which trains had been hitting pedestrians and cars since the 1850s). The elevated line ran directly into the upper floors of factories and warehouses along the West Side, delivering cargo without the cost or risk of street-level handling. Chelsea Market, the food hall the line passes through at 15th and 16th, was originally a Nabisco bakery. The Oreo was invented inside that building in 1913. The freight line carried flour in and cookies out for decades.

The industrial economy that justified the viaduct dwindled in the postwar years. The southernmost section of the line was demolished in the 1960s. The last train rolled north in 1980, carrying three carloads of frozen turkeys. The track sat for two decades, slowly being reclaimed by self-seeded plants whose seeds had blown in from the Hudson and lodged in the gravel between the rails. By the late 1990s the Giuliani administration was preparing to demolish what was left.

Joshua David and Robert Hammond met at a community board meeting about the planned demolition in 1999. Neither was an architect. David was a travel writer; Hammond was a painter. They co-founded Friends of the High Line that October. The campaign that followed reframed the viaduct as a possible park rather than an industrial relic, and the reframing held. The Bloomberg administration changed course. The first section of the park opened on June 8, 2009. By 2019 the High Line was drawing approximately eight million visitors a year.

The catalyst

What David and Hammond did, technically, was preserve a piece of infrastructure. What it produced economically is harder to fit into a sentence. The neighborhoods immediately adjacent to the line, West Chelsea in particular, transformed within a decade into some of the priciest residential real estate in Manhattan. Sociologists call this the "amenity effect." The High Line was the amenity. Property values rose by hundreds of percent along the corridor.

Real-estate development followed the rising values. The most ambitious of those projects, Hudson Yards, sits at the northern end of the line on a platform built over the active Long Island Rail Road West Side Yard. It is projected to cost approximately twenty-five billion dollars at completion, the most expensive private real estate development in United States history. The platform alone, a 28-acre concrete deck over 30 live rail tracks, was an engineering project on the scale of a small airport.

Hudson Yards also drew public subsidies. How much subsidy depends on what counts. The New York City Independent Budget Office has published partial accountings since 2013 without a unified total. The most rigorous synthesis to date, by Bridget Fisher and Flavia Leite of the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis at the New School (working paper 2018, updated 2020), put the public contribution at approximately five point six billion dollars, once 7-train extension costs, 421-a tax abatements, payments-in-lieu-of-taxes discounts, and interest on city-issued bonds were all included. A more conservative IBO-derivable figure is in the range of two point two to two point four billion. Either is large by any comparison. The 7-train extension to 34th Street alone cost the city about two point four billion in tax-increment financing bonds, and a promised intermediate station at 41st and 10th was cut to save money.

The founder's verdict

The most credible critic of what the High Line catalyzed is the man who built it. Robert Hammond gave a 2017 interview to CityLab in which he reflected on the surrounding neighborhood's transformation. "We failed," he said, of the park's effect on local affordability and the community that had lived in West Chelsea before the boom. Hammond has spent the years since helping found the High Line Network, a coalition of about thirty similar adaptive-reuse projects in other American cities, specifically organized around sharing the lessons of what worked, what did not, and what to do differently. The Network's founding document treats gentrification as a design problem to be planned around, not an inevitability.

The political-economy critics extend the point. Sharon Zukin's Naked City (Oxford, 2010) places the High Line inside a broader pattern of cultural reappropriation that helps drive displacement. Jeremiah Moss's Vanishing New York (Dey Street, 2017) calls the line a "tourist-clogged catwalk and a catalyst for some of the most rapid gentrification in the city's history." Michael Kimmelman, reviewing Hudson Yards for The New York Times in March 2019, called the development "a supersized suburban-style office park, with a shopping mall and a quasi-gated condo community targeted at the 0.1 percent."

The other reading is also true

The other reading, the one the park's defenders keep returning to, is also fully grounded. The viaduct was scheduled for demolition; without the campaign that David and Hammond led, it is steel rubble. The park draws eight million annual visitors and charges nothing to enter. The horticultural standard of the planting (designed by Piet Oudolf, James Corner Field Operations, and Diller Scofidio + Renfro) is higher than nearly any public park in the country. The Shed, the cultural venue at the northern end of Hudson Yards, programs original work rather than blockbuster franchises and has become one of the few large-scale defenders of new performing arts in New York. The 30+ projects in the High Line Network represent a deliberate effort to do this better in other cities.

Both readings are defensible. The argument the High Line tour makes, gently but firmly, is that you cannot pick one and ignore the other. The Vessel, the bronze stair-sculpture in the Hudson Yards plaza, cost approximately two hundred million dollars. It closed in 2021 after four suicides between February 2020 and July 2021. It reopened in October 2024 with steel-mesh barriers; the top level remains closed. The Edge observation deck at 30 Hudson Yards rises 1,131 feet above the plaza. Standing at the base of either, you can look south along the elevated walkway and see the entire two-and-a-half-kilometer corridor in one frame. The catalyst at one end, the bill at the other, and the question, who paid for it and on what terms, walked end to end.

The tour does not resolve the question. The answer is being negotiated as you read this in zoning hearings, in Friends of the High Line's outreach work, in Hammond's quiet ongoing revision of his own work. Walk the line slowly. Watch what is in front of you and what is underneath. The argument the city is having with itself about its own future is laid out, four billion dollars per kilometer, in plain sight.