Growing a Greener World Episode 907: New York's High Line

[Music] the 2018 Subaru Crosstrek built in a zero landfill plant so you can roam the earth with a lighter footprint [Music] Subaru proud sponsor of growing a greener world [Music] I'm Joel amble when I created growing a greener world I had one goal to tell stories of everyday people innovators entrepreneurs forward-thinking leaders who are all in ways both big and small dedicated to organic gardening and farming lightening our footprint conserving vital resources protecting natural habitats making a tangible difference for us all they're real they're passionate they're all around us they're the game changers who are literally growing a greener world and inspiring the rest of us to do the same growing a greener world it's more than a movement it's our mission New York City is famous for all kinds of things including its public parks but you might be surprised to find out that perhaps the most incredible green space of all isn't under your feet it's over your head the High Line winds its way through the streets of Manhattan for nearly a mile and a half but sits 30 feet off the ground that's because this entire park was repurposed from an abandoned elevated railway now it's a fully sustainable landscape that provides a home to nearly half of all the plant species native to the United States all in an acre and a half of the most densely populated city in America once destined for demolition the High Line has become one of the crown jewels of this city and an environmental rags to riches story that could only happen in New York railroads have been a part of Manhattan's West Side since the 1840s when street level tracks were used to transport coal dairy products and beef around the already booming downtown of New York City but over time freight trains became increasingly more dangerous when mixed with the other traffic on the growing city streets and the idea of an elevated railway was born in 1929 as a safer way to keep the trains rolling overhead the new High Line railway cut across city blocks instead of following street lines going right through the middle of numerous factories and warehouses this allowed the trains to be unloaded inside the buildings they were serving while never disturbing traffic on the streets below but by the 1950s and 60s the trucking industry had exploded and use of the rail line dropped the last strain ran in 1980 and the tracks although structurally sound sat unused and abandoned for nearly two decades and that's when local resident Robert Hammond a history major who was working in the marketing of start-up internet companies first crossed paths with his forgotten piece of the city's past I read an article in The New York Times that they were probably gonna tear down the High Line and that had a little map that showed that the High Line was a mile and a half long I'd seen it in the neighborhood I lived in the West Village you know but I didn't know it was all connected I didn't know the history and so I just assumed that everything in New York has a preservation group attached to it so I thought I could volunteer maybe help Bret may raise money and so quickly it called around and no one was doing anything there was no group so I went through my first community board meeting and never had been vinta one and I sat next to another guy just coincidentally that I didn't know and that by the end of the meeting we realized no one cared either people actively wanted to tear it down or they didn't care at all and so we started talking this we exchanged business cards and said maybe we'll do something together so that was Joshua David the other co-founder and at first our goal was to stop it from being demolished you know we didn't know what should happen up on the High Line you know they're people that do this and they should do it so we went to the Municipal Art Society the architecture League the American Institute of Architects a lot of different foundations some of them were interested you know and supportive but they said we're not going to do this you know and that the subtext was this is never gonna happen you know this is such a lost cause looking back it wasn't clear what it was just because you're gonna save it it wasn't clear what it should become and so we did an ideas competition and it was open to anyone you didn't have to be an architect and you could the ideas also didn't have to be realistic so you know we had 720 entries from 36 countries it was one of the largest ideas competitions at that time and you know my one of the winners was a mile long lap pool there was an urban roller coaster you know all these different ideas and what it helped want it put the project on the map another thing the ideas competition did is help people think differently you know instead of oh this is a rusty ruin what out what could it become but for all of his efforts thus far in trying to save the High Line Robert had never even been on the High Line he and Joshua arranged for the railroad company to give them a tour so they could see firsthand for the very first time what they were trying to save they gave us this tour and that's when I think we really fell in love with the projects we went up there and there was a mile and a half of wildflowers in the middle of the New York City there was an incredible tension between hard and soft nature and man-made you know the beautiful and the ugly and you know sort of progress in decay of the city and and that's really what you know I fell in love with Robert and Josh took some photos of what they saw that day but knew it wouldn't be enough to convey the potential of the High Line to the scores of people who would still need convincing and so we contacted photographer this famous for a grenade Joel Sternfeld we took him up he said don't let any other photographer up here for a year and I'll give you exactly what you want so he went up there for a year all different seasons all different kind of times of day and brought back these photos that are what what really drove our project for a long time because instead of we learned to speak less and show the photos more because people could envision different things up there you know some people envisioned it is you know about the wildflowers about this native landscape some people saw it as a place for architecture some people saw it about rail history some people just saw it as open space and people saw it as a parks and people saw it as a thing for light rail because Josh and I always said we're not gonna decide what goes up there the public should really decide and we did dozens of community input and if I could summarize all that it was it was we like the Joel Sternfeld photos we like this wild landscape in soon support for turning the Highline into a large-scale landscape project started picking up steam the city administration revoked the demolition order and even gave the first chunk of capital funding for the saving of the Highline and after a full-fledged design competition a team was chosen for the job CSX Transportation officially donated the mile-and-a-half structure to the city work crews broke ground in early 2006 and slowly a transformation began to take shape it wasn't like a slavish recreation of exactly what what was there because that was one way to do it okay you like the Joel stone from photos we're gonna remove everything and just try to put it back you know try to recreate it sort of this Disney version of what was there but I think what the design team thought was that's not the spirit of the High Line this the the howling wasn't meant to look like that Wildscape it was meant to look like a railroad you know whether they sprayed with pesticides and nothing was supposed to grow on it they got you needed to build something new but it needed to reference the past and there's a great quote in a book called the leopard I just happen to be reading it during the competition that said for everything to stay the same everything has to change and I really thought they got that the landscape architecture firm was New York based James corner field operations the architects Diller Scofidio and Renfro both are heavy hitters in the innovative urban design movement today but according to Hammond were relatively newcomers at the time with an approach that gave the abandoned railway the look and feel of a modern park that used to be a railway [Music] it had this planking system that evoke that linear feeling but it was also rough it was just concrete that feathered into the landscape so it also the planting could grow up in between the planks and feel like nature sort of taking over that man-made environment garden design fell to renowned Dutch nurserymen Piet Rudolph in the plant palate he chose turned out to be the magical final ingredient and then this landscape that Pete and James corner came up with that is inspired by what was there but completely different on the other hand you know I asked Pete is this a wild landscape and he said there's nothing wild about it this is idealized nature the first of the High Line sections open to the public in 2009 the second opened two years later the third section opened in 2014 Andy Pettis is the director of horticulture and that idealized nature is now her responsibility the plantings on the High Line are really meant to evoke what was growing here spontaneously when the railroad was in disuse we have about 500 species and cultivars of plants going on the High Line 1,200 trees about 110,000 perennials altogether it's a it's a lot of diversity as you're saying they I think there is a misconception that all of the plants are native or that they were all growing here on their own and and we just used those same plants that's that's not true we when the park was under construction we had to strip everything off including the soil and to do a lot of remediation there was lead paint there was asbestos there who knows what the railroad had been spraying on the soils for years to keep weeds down and prevent track fires so we had to abate all of that we brought in new soil and and and all of these beautiful plantings it's a very cosmopolitan plant design it's about half native plants native to the United States about 30% of all of the plants growing here on the High Line are native to the Northeast and the rest are introduced species and as gardeners here are our sort of mission is to maintain the integrity of those designs they're very dynamic designs there are a lot of plants in this design that self-sow so they kind of migrate and find their way to where they want to be and we edit that process a little bit we'll take seedlings out of from over here and maybe transplant them over here so we're looking for proportion and balance aesthetically in the gardens but being suspended above ground the High Line faces challenges that just don't come into play in other gardens it is a very unique place to be cultivating plants some of the challenges the horticulturists face here on the High Line are really high winds off the Hudson River we're 30 feet up in the air and so we're very exposed to the elements it's at any time it's five to ten degrees colder or five to ten degrees warmer than it is at street level so we deal with that a lot kind of severe temperatures we're basically a bridge so the soil freezes from above and below and we get a lot of heaving in the wintertime and root damage so that can be a real issue and remember this is the city that never sleeps a city that is still growing all the time and in every direction in New York you may have the perfect location but you're always affected by what your neighbors are doing there's a ton of construction happening along the Highline right now and so new high-rises are plunging areas of the garden that were designed for full Sun into full shade and we're seeing new wind corridors and new precipitation shadows and all of that is affecting the kinds of plants we can grow in different areas along the Highline so we're having to sort of think about that and and try to predict what how the gardens are going to succeed so to speak as an ecological process and and that's really how we'll think about it when we're changing the plant palette up is you know if if this was a tree canopy growing up rather than a high-rise what are the kinds of plants that would fill these niches in in our garden in this landscape so we'll think about the kinds of shade plants that might find their way in understory trees those kinds of things [Music] walking up and down the High Line you never forget you're in the middle of New York City and that was a deliberate choice by the design team but what is easy to forget is it you're not on solid ground in fact this is one big giant green roof and as a gardener as I look at all these lush plantings and some big trees and shrubs I can't help but wonder about the planting mix that goes into making up the health of all of these plants the soils are about 18 inches deep on average although some of the areas are as little as nine inches of soil some of them places where our larger trees are growing we are mounted up or in planters so it's a little deeper than that 36 to 48 inches but for the most part we're working with very little soil the soil on the High Line was very carefully manufactured to be quickly draining we are essentially a giant window box so we we need to make sure that the moisture levels in the soil are carefully regulated so that we don't drown any of the plants and it dries out very very quickly in the summertime especially one of the biggest challenges we face on the High Line is that there's just no space we don't have a lot of room for composting so we have been very creative in coming up with solutions as to how to do this and one of the ways we did it was we started a static aerated system so we converted one of our bin systems to a static aerated composting system which basically means we put perforated pipe up through the middle of the bin and we force air through it and that just keeps the the pile aerated so that we don't have to spend as much labour turning the compost and it also speeds up the natural processes that decay and make that happen still very labor-intensive most recently we were able to purchase an in-vessel composting machine called the Rockettes and basically it's this giant cylinder and literally the the plant material goes in one side there's an auger that is just constantly turning and turning and turning and two weeks later our compost comes out the other side it's really remarkable and it has definitely sped up our compost and this year we expect that we will be able to compost 100% of the material we take out of the beds on sites and compost it right here and put it right back into the garden so we're very excited about that in the High Line's commitment to environmental stewardship doesn't end with their composting efforts and II staff doesn't use chemicals in the gardens not even chemical fertilizers and when it comes to maintaining the mile-and-a-half-long garden well it turns out in the most populated city in the country there's no shortage of willing gardeners you know the great thing about horticulture in Manhattan and I'm working at a public garden in Manhattan is that people don't often have a lot of their own green space or outdoor space so they're really itching to get their hands in the soil so we're really lucky to have some very excited volunteers in March every year we do all of our cutting back of the but you know last year's growth in the gardens and the first year we we opened we knew that we wouldn't be able to use machines to do that for one thing we have this you know this this gravel mulch which is meant to evoke railroad ballast but it means that we can't mow in the gardens we can't use weed trimmers string trimmers in the gardens to to do any of that cutting back we decided to do it all by hand using shears and pruners and we brought on this army of volunteers to help us so we have anywhere between 100 and 300 volunteers who come throughout the month of March to help us cut back all of the perennials and herbaceous plants in the garden and it's become a real event every year it's sort of the the first big thing we get to do in the park and it sort of opens the season for us people come back year after year and and we all look forward to cut back spring cut back on the High Line every year so it's really become the sort of community event [Music] people ask me all the time what are my favorite plants and it's like asking a mother which is your favorite child I they're all my favorites and at different times of the year so I've for instance in the springtime one of my favorite places on the High Line right now is just north of us the Washington grasslands where we have some cat mint sand and grasses and sort of lots of meadow plants growing up and at this point there there are these beautiful undulating green it's almost like a topography and then later in the summer probably one of my favorite places on the High Line is the Lisa Marie Falcone flyover which is an area of the High Line that sort of peels up from the structure itself and as a canopy a walk so you actually walk through a canopy of big leaf magnolias it feels very sort of prehistoric to be walking through there and of course it's nice and shady and so it feels very cool and comfortable in the in the middle middle of the summer in the fall my favorite place on the High Line is definitely the Chelsea grasslands between 18th and 20th Street's little blue stems and swich grasses and prairie dropseed and big bluestem and and other grasses that are native to the Prairie State so it really feels like a prairie or a meadow winter on the High Line is a really magical experience especially under a fresh snowfall we don't cut any of the perennials or Bhatia's plants back until March so all of the seed heads and the sort of mounding grasses and all of that structure of what we like to call the skeletons of the plants are persistent in the winter gardens the High Line is really beautiful throughout the seasons and it was very intentionally designed that way a lot of people think of the High Line is this design project but in a lot of ways it's a plant project because it's and and even people that don't appreciate the planting what I don't think they realize is it's changing their whole experience we we have a little shop on the High Line where we sell highlight t-shirts and I talked to someone that worked in our store and she's worked in retail her whole life she said it's like clockwork that a few times a week a customer would freak out and scream at her and just have you know blow up when she worked on the highlight it only happened once a month and she said it's not the merchandise it's that they're not you know in a fluorescent lit store they're in nature they feel different they're in a different it changes and now the science is backing up and literally changes their chemistry you know it literally makes you physically scientifically healthier that's why I think for a lot of people it feels very much like New York because it has a little bit of the grit of the city you know that you're seeing parts of the city but you're also in this natural environment I think the thing that surprised me the most is that this thing worked at all would anyone come did anyone want to walk three flights up a set of stairs would the plants live and just several inches of soil you know that's on on a bridge that's gonna fry in the summer and freeze in the winter would people throw things off would it be dangerous and I knew the first day to open I realized it was better because of the people now one of the things partly it's the landscape the planning but it's also the people that make it special it's the combination it's not it's not just the planning it's it's both together that really animate the space because I think a lot of what it's about is people watching and having these interactions you know with people and so you know it's so far beyond what we ever expected [Music] you want to talk about exceeding expectations when the High Line was first set to open robert estimated they get about 300,000 visitors they cut a million and last year seven and a half million people visited this place that's more than the Metropolitan Museum or the Museum of Natural History it really is an incredible place whether you come to check out the amazing flowers or the awesome art or simply people watch it's very apparent that the High Line has weaved its way into the cultural fabric of Manhattan's West Side and while it's safe to say that even though no one quite knew what to do with this place over the 20 years that stayed vacant New Yorkers can't imagine this place without the High Line today and there's a lot to learn about the highlighting including the spark that it lit to ignite green urban development all over the US and beyond and we have that information on our website under the show notes for this episode and the website address that's the same as our show name it's growing a greener world calm thanks for joining us everybody i'm joel ample and we'll see you back here next time for more growing a greener world [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Growing a Greener World

Views: 28,872

Keywords: New York City, Manhattan, High Line, Public Park, park, native plant, railway, rail line, revitalize, revitalization, cultural events, piet oudolf, Friends of the High Line, garden, gardening, horticulture, horticulturalist, landscape design, landscape

Id: Xd79s3YVKQI

Length: 25min 13sec (1513 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 13 2018