The High Line at the West Side Rail Yards

The entrance to the High Line at 34th Street

If you visit The High Line today it’s pretty hard to imagine what it looked like a few years ago. The elevated railway was built in the 1930s to transport freight trains above the traffic along Manhattan’s Tenth Avenue, which was known as “Death Avenue” prior to the High Line’s construction due to the number of accidents that occurred there. After trains stopped running on the High Line in 1980 it was closed off to any use and overgrown by trees and wildflowers. A non-profit group, Friends of the High Line, successfully lobbied to keep the High Line from being demolished in the 1990s and now maintains a park on the grounds, which opened to the public in 2009. This revitalized High Line is sleek, attractive, reliably crowded with tourists, and has proved to be an economic boon to the area. However, despite tasteful touches evoking its industrial past—some weedy plantings here, a few inconspicuous train tracks there—it retains none of the raw allure that drew urban explorers to it in the first place.

I was lucky to get a glimpse of the undeveloped High Line when the last section, known as the High Line at the West Side Rail Yards opened briefly to the public during Open House New York in October. This route starts at West 34th Street and the Twelfth Avenue, crosses the West Side Railyards (site of the huge Hudson Yards redevelopment project), and curves East to meet the High Line Park at West 30th Street and Tenth Avenue. With construction on this part of the park already underway and an opening date set for 2014, this was one last opportunity to experience the High Line as it was, circa 1980-2006.

After handing over our tickets, we stepped through a fence walled with high weeds on exhaust-choked 34th Street and entered a wild, post-industrial world. To our left the train tracks ended abruptly in a tangle of brush that you’d never guess was thirty feet from the line for the Megabus. To our right the tracks, still in relatively good condition, curved over a bridge which spanned a dozen sleeping Long Island Rail Road trains.

The West Side Rail Yards

The terrain became trickier on the overpass. Between the rusting guardrails the High Line was completely filled with high gold grass, Queen Anne’s lace, daisies, and unidentified weeds, all of which had a smell similar to a field in the country—not something you’d find in a Manhattan park. The weeds covered a treacherous ground of rails, uprooted rail ties, wood beams, pricker bushes, mossy stones, gravel, glass shards, and random refuse. A few spunky trees sprouted from between the rails, waving in a steady wind off the Hudson River. Treading carefully, we stumbled over a few signs of human life: a child’s Nerf football squishing under someone’s foot, fading graffiti scrawled upon even-more-fading graffiti, an old switchbox loaded with embers from a fire. All was peaceful except for the occasional siren squalling from West Chelsea, below.

Old switchbox

The route then curved along 30th Street like a grassy avenue stretching toward the Garment District’s office buildings in some post-human time. Our pace slowed, not because walking was difficult, but because we found ourselves taking in every detail before time was up. I was reminded of playing in the woods as a little kid, and making discoveries in a place that was not, during my time there, inhabited or planned by anyone. In a city where everything must be a design upon a design, we knew, as the last of us were herded toward the manicured section of the park, that there would be no going back.

Walking along 30th Street

Map and plans showing what the High Line at the West Side Rail Yards will look like are available here. This section of the park is scheduled to open in 2014. The rest of the park is currently operating on a limited schedule due to damage from Hurricane Sandy so check their site for hours.