Improbable Journey: The Story of New York's High Line

this is Manhattan Business Center of New York City and part of the city's life motion pictures take us behind the scene of a great rail that work history of the High Line starting in the 1840s a bunch of businesspeople in New York came together and planned a railroad from the 1840s into the early 1900's it was the primary artery to get people and things in and out of New York City as soon as those tracks got laid almost from the very beginning in the mid 1800s there was this problem of the trains traveling at grade level and a crowded in the crowded city and the accidents that they caused and it used to run down on tenth Avenue and it was called death Avenue because so many people were run over by the trains for a short period of time the New York Central who began to run the railroad at that point actually hired people to run on horses that were called the west side Cowboys and they ran out in front of the trains with red flags warning people of the trains were coming but in 1929 the city the state and the New York Central Railroad came together in a historic agreement the biggest transportation infrastructure project in New York City known as the West Side improvement and what it did basically was eliminate grade crossings along the west side of Manhattan early 1930s to High Line sections completed from Canal Street up to 34th Street it was 21 feet above ground warehouses in that area were rebuilt so they could handle Freight up at the second or third level the early bird gets underway destination New York starting in 1934 it got a new nickname which was the lifeline of New York because it brought in a lot of food a lot of the warehouses were all food warehouses there's the most famously the Nabisco Factory which is now Chelsea Market after World War Two as manufacturing left New York City the need for heavy freight rail really began to diminish into the 1960s you basically had the traffic north of there begin to just disappear and in the 1960s part of it from Clarkson to Bank Street was demolished and then there was another demolition in 1990 that brought it up to two Gansevoort Street which is where it ends today will see us accidents predecessors date back to 1827 and we're stewards of a marvelous infrastructure that goes through thousands of communities in the eastern United States we're primarily a freight railroad of course that's our bread and butter what we acquired the property as part of our acquisition of Conrail and having almost a mile and a half of property through lower Manhattan is highly unusual there's there's nothing else like it when we first came to see the High Line in its aging quality we realized that this was a property no longer used for rail operations and that we had to find some use for the property into the future and the High Line had some issues it was the subject of ongoing lawsuits it had some deterioration that was being pointed out by building inspectors and others so the first strategy immediately after Conroe was acquired the push was to demolish it we didn't necessarily think that was a great thing but that seemed to be what the city wanted and all the interest wanted one of the first things that CSX did was commissioned a study on what to do about the High Line for the Regional Plan Association we listened to others who had ideas on how this property might be utilized everything from horizontal parking lot to rolling billboard one of the possible solutions that came out of that report was rail banking well rail banking is the idea that when lines of railroad become was no longer useful for Freight news of interested parties and communities governmental agencies can work out at a consensual arrangement with the freight railroad to reuse the right-of-way for trail and other park-like purposes I live in the West Village and I seen the High Line but it really didn't give it that much thought and then I read an article in The New York Times that it was going to be demolished so in that newspaper articles CSX mentioned the openness to the idea of doing some kind of park proposal on the High Line I went to my first community board meeting where I heard CSX was presenting a study that they had commissioned from the RTA about different uses i sat next to Robert coincidentally and the discussion about the High Line began CSX basically said they were looking at all different kinds of options but most people in the room either didn't care at all or really wanted to tear it down and we began to look at how could you build an organization with a mission of preserving the structure and figuring out an exciting way to reuse it we realized we were the only two people really interested in it so we exchanged business cards and that's how we started Friends of the High Line we went and approached CSX about the idea it was really through the Friends of the High Line to got the ball going on this and started to create the drama and the enthusiasm for this public park one of the single most important things that happened to save the High Line in the very early days was when CSX made it possible for Joel Sternfeld project to photograph that they basically made it possible for the world to see what was on top of the High Line when you got up there there was a mile and a half of wildflowers running right through the middle of Manhattan with views of the Empire State Building in the Statue of Liberty and that's really when I fell in love with it it was so spectacular and so unusual that you couldn't it you couldn't let go after that we were invited to visit an earlier administration of the city of New York and I had the opportunity of meeting with the deputy mayor who told us as we walked in the door that our High Line was the biggest blight in the city of New York we really didn't own land we own rights property rights but they were in the air we own an areal easement we own a concrete and steel structure but it overrides other properties owned by other people whose ability to develop their property in the future is severely impacted by the fact that it has this big railroad structure over it group of property owners came to City Hall wheeling a cart on which there was a big chunk of concrete that had fallen from the High Line onto somebody's property and this was the how they made their case for why the city needed to tear down the High Line as soon as possible because in their view it was a threat to health and safety of people in the area the city during the new years from the 80s and the 90s agreed with the property owners they also felt there was no opportunity for development of the High Line and that it was a blight and they were really looking to get this part of the city development the Meatpacking District and West Chelsea were already beginning to transform there were galleries coming in more restaurants the previous administrations looked at the High Line as something that if it came down we could just really redevelop the neighborhood here you have this neighborhood that's so close to so many other prime parts of Manhattan the weiners are packed in carton and yet the zoning still prescribed larger than manufacturing uses that had left this city decades ago and that wasn't coming back there people have a right to feel the other way about and it got to the point where in the final days of the Giuliani administration papers were signed that would have committed the city to participating in the demolition agreement from hiline there was a real turning point in the city's policy towards the High Line in 2001-2002 timeframe and it's really attributable to one simple reasonable change in the mayoral administration the High Line's a good idea we don't have anything like it in this city the Bloomberg administration understood the visions that the friends had for the reuse of the line as well as our desires for the use of the line as a public park coincident with the redevelopment of the High Line there was a city policy to encourage the redevelopment of the entire neighborhood and that required a reason but how do we figure out how to use the city's interest in up zoning with the community's interest in preserving this immediate area and the interest in preserving the High Line itself as a park and combining those things using a tool called the transfer of development rights or TDRs as they're known for example assume that a property owner whose property isn't covered by the High Line has the legal right to build a six-story building but because of the High Line can really only build a one-story building we created the right for the adjacent property owner to theoretically build a ten-story building but only gave them the air rights to enable them to build a five storey building how could they build a 10-story building they had to purchase five storeys from the property owner whose site they underneath the island and at that point everybody was able to come together over the next couple years on an agreement where the underlying property owners would be able to get the benefit of these transferred development rights where the railroad would be indemnified for any liabilities with the city getting the ability to zone the way it wanted to zone and the friends being able to preserve the line in its entirety this has been a moment that I know we've all been eagerly awaiting after a Mayor Bloomberg came in office he started thinking about design we did a real design competition in 2004 where we actually selected the design team of James corner field operations and Diller Scofidio and Renfro we broke ground in April of 2006 seeing the transformation of this structure beginning was just incredibly the design and construction really achieved the goals of reclaiming a usable past the planting is really one of the things that's special about the highlight that was done by garden designer named people Duff and he really was inspired by this wild landscape that was growing but now it changes every two weeks and we opened the first section in 2009 it was such an outstanding success when it first opened that they had two women access that summer before we open we thought maybe 300,000 people would come here last year we have 3.7 million visitors and this year will have definitely have over 4 million visitors so it's far exceeded anything that we thought every time I look at it I have to almost pinch myself you know I'll be walking in the area and I'll hear people talking on the phone and they'll say let me get the highlight and then we open this second section from 20th to 30th Street in 2011 and in how many years we hope to open the final section at the Westside for Eleanor it's bringing us to 34th Street well I think CSX is extremely proud to be part of a project that has been so successful has become an enormous icon of New York City now and it's a place that people come from all over the world to see it and that I think everybody who worked on the project whether at Friends of the High Line and CSX or at the city we're all grateful for having played a part of something that's really gonna have a lasting impact here in New York everyone loves trains and people always love that sense of the journey and the idea of looking out the window and watching the changing skate the Highline I think evokes and preserves that you know Steven Pete probably had the best understanding of how early difficult and unlikely this would be and yet they were willing to work with us and you know give us that opening that help make it all happen you you

Channel: CSX

Views: 17,482

Keywords: train, rail, New York (US State), Nyc, CSX

Id: MRmvUTptGtY

Length: 14min 8sec (848 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 03 2013