LATE last month, city officials and the group Friends of the HighLine presented the final design for part of the $170 million High Linepark that is under construction on the West Side of Manhattan. The HighLine, an abandoned elevated railway that once carried freight to, andsometimes inside, warehouses, is already a fanciful forest ofindustrial decay and native plants, and it has the potential to be themost delightful and unconventional green space in the country. Andyet I was struck by the banality of the plans unveiled. The idea, cometo at great expense and after much fanfare, is essentially to plantsome native shrubs {the same shrubs that have been colonizing thestructure since the last train ran on it, in 1980} and thread a paththrough them. I’d been hoping for a utopia. Instead, I got sumac. Theplan’s most exciting element is a big glass panel that would allowpeople on 10th Avenue to look up and see the pedestrians on the HighLine. This, plate glass and sumac, provides the city with absolutelynothing it doesn’t already have in abundance.What a waste. TheHigh Line is in many ways a metaphor for the heterogeneity of New York,and an ideal plan should reflect that. It joins two neighborhoods thathave been in historic opposition: Greenwich Village, the historicalheart of bohemia, and Midtown, a center of global capitalism andcorporate culture. To span the gulf, it runs through a largely defunctslaughterhouse district, a gallery district, low-income housingprojects, the center of gay Manhattan and heaps of old warehouses.Can’t this be a place to dream?The High Line is exposed mostlyin the meatpacking district, with views over the city and the river. Itoverlooks the street, rather than running through a corridor ofbuildings. Why not convert the little-trafficked block of Little West12th Street, between West Street and Washington Street, into a slopedpasture that ascends gradually to the deck of the High Line? Here thedeck and pasture could be used for outdoor concerts, dancing andmovies, maximizing the openness of this neighborhood. During the day itwould be a place for sports and sunbathing, and somewhere to takechildren from the West Village. Bring in some farm animals to graze onthe pasture, adjacent to the quasi-defunct Gansevoort Meat Marketbuilding, and you’d have something like Chicago’s Lincoln Park. TheVillage would be a village again!As the High Line approaches14th Street it briefly doubles in width, passing through the EasternMeats building. How about installing snow-making machinery {faithful tothe historic use of the building}, thereby filling this interior spacewith winter year round? O.K. maybe this isn’t the greenest ofsuggestions, but we New Yorkers often take ourselves too seriously andyet, given the opportunity to dream, choke on our own seriousness: theresult is the sort of middlebrow design now on the drawing board.Ina city that loves farmers’ markets, what about using the section thatis almost 50 percent covered {by Chelsea Market, and by a pedestrianbridge} for a multifaceted, small-business mercantile district basedaround stalls and kiosks? This could be part Arab souk and part PonteVecchio — a space with food vendors and little repair shops; somewhereyou could go to get your lamps rewired, your shoes resoled and yourcomputer fixed, and buy a bag of oranges. As for the gallerydistrict, why not add an exhibition space atop the High Line, and modelit, loosely, on the Vasari Corridor in Florence {another galleryrunning above the deck of a bridge}? Shows could be drawn from thecollections of New York City museums, or installed by artists.Shouldn’t public art be an integral part of this project, rather thanshoehorned into a corner in Chelsea Market, as it seems to be in thecurrent plan?And, finally, the several-block section above 30thStreet is the place to do big things, noisy things, that w
www.nytimes.com/2008/07/09/opinion/09wilsey.html?_r=2&ref=opinion&oref=slogin&oref=slogin