The High Line

er i aprilnummeret til National Geographic

Walking on the High Line is unlike any other experience in New York. You float about 25 feet above the ground, at once connected to street life and far away from it. Det var et togspor som fraktet kjøtt og industrivarer over gateplanet på nedre venstrebredd av Manhattan, nå en park, bygd opp med planter og trær som likner det som hadde vokst opp etter mange år med ubruk, en slags fortettet versjon av det som var.



Until recently the High Line was, in fact, an urban relic, and a crumbling one at that. Many of its neighbors, as well as New York's mayor for much of the 1990s, Rudolph Giuliani, couldn't wait to tear it down. His administration, aware that Chelsea was gentrifying into a neighborhood of galleries, restaurants, and loft living, felt the surviving portion of the High Line (..) was an ugly deadweight.

But the real heroes of the story are two men who met for the first time at a community meeting on the future of the line in 1999. Joshua David was then 36, a freelance writer who lived on West 21st Street, not far from the midsection of the High Line. Robert Hammond, an artist who worked for start-up tech companies to earn a living, was 29 and lived in Greenwich Village a few blocks from the southern terminus.

Her kan du lese mer om hvordan kjøtt-toglinja ble reddet

It didn't hurt that Michael Bloomberg, who succeeded Giuliani, had a sympathetic view of saving the High Line. Bloomberg, a billionaire who had long been a major donor to the city's cultural institutions, offered support for the High Line plan.

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