About six years ago the first section of the now celebrated High Line was opened in New York and made a palpable hit both locally and internationally. Locally it revealed what one might have guessed, that the inhabitants of Manhattan’s downtown suffered a severe lack of amenity. Every place to walk or run or ride a bike, every place to exercise the dog, is valuable and well used. This new and unusual park, restoring and converting the tracks of a disused overhead railway, was reserved neither for running nor biking nor walking the dog, but rather for strolling, sitting and sunbathing, and for the novelty of looking in on buildings old and new, from unusual angles and with an unusual degree of impertinence. That is, it soon became something of a place for voyeurs and exhibitionists — men with large chests, for instance.
But it also, to an incomprehensible degree, attracted international tourists — five million visitors a year by now to an ugly part of the city that used to house the meatpacking district.
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