Calling up such adjectives as "unruly beauty," "melancholy," "otherworldly" and "magical," four architectural design firms offered competing ideas on Thursday for turning a rusty, long-abandoned railroad spur into a multipurpose public recreation space.
The High Line, an elevated trestle meandering 1.45 miles along Manhattan's West Side, was built more than 70 years ago to carry incoming rail freight to city warehouses. Unused since 1980, it has become a sort of linear "wildscape," as one architect described it -- its tracks and roadbed covered with urban debris, along with flowers, shrubs and other plants tough enough to make it anywhere.
It is now seen as part of the transformation of a part of Manhattan long neglected -- some 20 blocks along 10th Avenue from the once-seedy Gansevoort meatpacking district that has suddenly become Gotham's newest celebrity magnet to the Hudson rail yards that could become the site of a new New York Jets football stadium, and 28 million square feet of new office space.
"There is a whole resurgence of the West Side and the High Line plays a key role in this," Amanda Burden, the socialite chair of the City Planning Commission, told a media gathering where the various proposals were on display.
She said the High Line itself would help tie together disparate neighborhoods of the West Side that include Gansevoort, recently designated a historic district, Chelsea with its art galleries, the area once called Hell's Kitchen, and Times Square.
In presenting "visions" rather than finished plans for the High Line, all four design teams contrasted the gritty "industrial artifact," as architect Elizabeth Diller called it, with fanciful ideas for green spaces and varied facilities -- restaurants, public areas and even a tower with a climbing wall -- that could be built atop.
At times they appeared to be trying to defeat each other in waxing poetic over a dilapidated structure, originally built to relieve the slaughter on 10th Avenue caused by cars competing with rumbling freight trains, and only recently denounced by area property owners as an eyesore that should be demolished.
"Inspired by the melancholic, unruly beauty of the High Line, where nature has reclaimed a once-vital piece of urban infrastructure, the team retools this industrial conveyance into a post-industrial instrument of leisure, life and growth," said James Corner, director of the Field Operations team that includes Diller.
"We see the High Line as a suspended valley in the Manhattan Alps. This steel calligraphy can become a place of quiet and reflection," said architect Steven Holl, who as far back as 1981 had proposed turning the trestle into a "bridge of houses."
Landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh called the High Line "almost ferocious" in its way of "slicing though the city." Ecologically, he said, it is "a strange mix of perched wetlands created by clogged drains, dry plants growing in 18 inches of ballast," and trees that flourish in the shade of tall buildings.
Where former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani sided with the demolition camp, his successor, Michael Bloomberg, has endorsed the idea of saving the High Line, and other politicians have joined in.
Robert Hammond, co-founder of a nonprofit community group called Friends of the High Line, said cost estimates for the project range from $65 to $100 million. The city has pledged $15 million and the federal government another $5 million, and matching and private funds will provide more, he said,
The rail line originally was 13 miles long but the southern end was taken down in the 1960s after an expanding trucking industry put railroads in peril. The surviving remnant, owned by the rail shipping firm CSX on land belonging to the city, state and some 20 private owners, has 6.7 acres of linear space, 30 to 60 feet wide and 18 to 30 feet above the streets.
Hammond said the High Line is not an urban rarity. "There are abandoned railroad lines and infrastructure everywhere," he said, citing Chicago, Philadelphia and Atlanta as other U.S. cities mulling what to do with similar leftovers from the industrial age.
http://1010wins.com/topstories/winstops ... 55143.html
The High Line, an elevated trestle meandering 1.45 miles along Manhattan's West Side, was built more than 70 years ago to carry incoming rail freight to city warehouses. Unused since 1980, it has become a sort of linear "wildscape," as one architect described it -- its tracks and roadbed covered with urban debris, along with flowers, shrubs and other plants tough enough to make it anywhere.
It is now seen as part of the transformation of a part of Manhattan long neglected -- some 20 blocks along 10th Avenue from the once-seedy Gansevoort meatpacking district that has suddenly become Gotham's newest celebrity magnet to the Hudson rail yards that could become the site of a new New York Jets football stadium, and 28 million square feet of new office space.
"There is a whole resurgence of the West Side and the High Line plays a key role in this," Amanda Burden, the socialite chair of the City Planning Commission, told a media gathering where the various proposals were on display.
She said the High Line itself would help tie together disparate neighborhoods of the West Side that include Gansevoort, recently designated a historic district, Chelsea with its art galleries, the area once called Hell's Kitchen, and Times Square.
In presenting "visions" rather than finished plans for the High Line, all four design teams contrasted the gritty "industrial artifact," as architect Elizabeth Diller called it, with fanciful ideas for green spaces and varied facilities -- restaurants, public areas and even a tower with a climbing wall -- that could be built atop.
At times they appeared to be trying to defeat each other in waxing poetic over a dilapidated structure, originally built to relieve the slaughter on 10th Avenue caused by cars competing with rumbling freight trains, and only recently denounced by area property owners as an eyesore that should be demolished.
"Inspired by the melancholic, unruly beauty of the High Line, where nature has reclaimed a once-vital piece of urban infrastructure, the team retools this industrial conveyance into a post-industrial instrument of leisure, life and growth," said James Corner, director of the Field Operations team that includes Diller.
"We see the High Line as a suspended valley in the Manhattan Alps. This steel calligraphy can become a place of quiet and reflection," said architect Steven Holl, who as far back as 1981 had proposed turning the trestle into a "bridge of houses."
Landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh called the High Line "almost ferocious" in its way of "slicing though the city." Ecologically, he said, it is "a strange mix of perched wetlands created by clogged drains, dry plants growing in 18 inches of ballast," and trees that flourish in the shade of tall buildings.
Where former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani sided with the demolition camp, his successor, Michael Bloomberg, has endorsed the idea of saving the High Line, and other politicians have joined in.
Robert Hammond, co-founder of a nonprofit community group called Friends of the High Line, said cost estimates for the project range from $65 to $100 million. The city has pledged $15 million and the federal government another $5 million, and matching and private funds will provide more, he said,
The rail line originally was 13 miles long but the southern end was taken down in the 1960s after an expanding trucking industry put railroads in peril. The surviving remnant, owned by the rail shipping firm CSX on land belonging to the city, state and some 20 private owners, has 6.7 acres of linear space, 30 to 60 feet wide and 18 to 30 feet above the streets.
Hammond said the High Line is not an urban rarity. "There are abandoned railroad lines and infrastructure everywhere," he said, citing Chicago, Philadelphia and Atlanta as other U.S. cities mulling what to do with similar leftovers from the industrial age.
http://1010wins.com/topstories/winstops ... 55143.html
