“Designing the High Line: Gansevoort Street to 30th Street”
By Patrick Hazari, Friends of the High Line, Finlay Printing, LLC USA, 160 pages, $30
Real estate entrepreneurs hoping to cash in on plans to create a park from the hulking railroad overpass known as the High Line won’t have too much longer to wait. But in case they’ve been getting impatient in the two years since the groundbreaking, Friends of the High Line recently published a comprehensive collection of design plans to reanimate interest.
The full-color, 160-page book, “Designing the High Line: Gansevoort Street to 30th Street,” is a collection of renderings, maps, architectural drawings and photographs of the High Line illustrating its construction in the 1930s, its abandonment after 1980 and its contemporary reconstruction.
The final design plans for Sections 1 and 2 of the High Line, which span 19 blocks, are provided in detail by Field Operations, a landscape and urban design group that includes architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro and others. (The fate of section three of the High Line, which curves along 30th Street into the Hudson Rail Yards, still remains uncertain, according to the book.)
Though the information is not new — and the section on High Line history is a bit thin — the book is nicely laid out with plenty of maps to help the reader locate specific features of the soon-to-be park, and renderings, so the reader can place him- or herself in a realistic park setting. All in all, it’s a step-by-step walk-through of design plans for those who don’t have the time or training to pore over architectural drawings.
Highlights include explanations of such design innovations as the use of striated, concrete planks to allow for “meandering, unscripted movement” (basically, gentle zigzagging) through the planting beds along the train tracks. Though planners had considered retaining the incredibly diverse landscape that developed naturally after the High Line’s abandonment, they eventually had to remove it to strengthen the underlying structure and will now replicate it.
For owners of real estate along the High Line, the book gives point-by-point illustrations of accesses to the High Line from the street and nearby buildings. It also presents special features, such as viewing spurs, sundecks, water features, etc., to which the public will presumably flock. All in all, it’s a two-dimensional taste of what readers will be able to enjoy in reality when Section 1 opens later this year.