Residues of a Dream World: The High Line, 2011

NEW YORK CITY, July 2011. A hand, perhaps an artist's hand,holds up for the viewer's delectation a hook. This is Walking the High Line (Sternfeld, 2001), a volume of photographs taken of an abandoned railroad track prior to its redevelopment as a public park, by celebrated American landscape photographer Joel Sternfeld. The pages refer to their location, a comedy of tautological representation pointing mimetically to the thing itself.

The geographical site in question is the High Line, now a stretch of reclaimed elevated rail trestle on the lower West Side of Manhattan, parallel to the Hudson River. Beginning at the end of the West Village, winding through the Meatpacking District and Chelsea, it concludes in the Hudson Yards and Hell's Kitchen. Since its opening, the High Line park has been broadly celebrated for its design ingenuity and community involvement, and is increasingly presented as a model public space, as national and international cities (such as Singapore, Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia) have considered— as exemplary—its model of repurposing industrial structures (Taylor, 2010).

The High Line's development has been constituted by photography since its inception, as the first push for its preservation was rhetorically organized by images of its ruin and rescue. Here, the artist as urban development's accomplice repeats a story of modern Haussmannization. In the mid-19th century, when the Prefect of the Seine, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, carried out the systematic demolition and rebuilding of sections of medieval Paris, the self-described artiste-démolisseur charged several archivists and the photographer Charles Marville with creating a historic record of Old Paris (Hambourg, 1981: 9; Rice, 1997: 39). The archivists allegedly advised Marville—subsequently known as the photographe de la Paris—regarding the streets and structures to be recorded before, during, and after their transformation under the Prefect's plan (Hambourg, 1981: 9; Rice, 1997: 85).

However, the trajectories of Marville and Sternfeld's photographic images diverge in the ways they have been used to influence urban policy. Marville's photographic preservation of the Old Paris sites marked them demolition, while Sternfeld's acts of photographic documentation of the High Line inspired its transformation (Gopnik, 2001: 48–9). The photographs of both Marville's Paris and Sternfeld's High Line accentuate the unkempt quality of their subjects; Marville's images emphasize the cluttered, their clearing as contrast to Haussmann's impending accomplishments (Hambourg, 1981: 10). However, for the High Line, photography enacts a return: its clearing, preservation, and renovation efforts provide public access to its primal state as a "self-sown wilderness" (FHL, 2008: 7).

Media pundits and the park's operators, Friends of the High Line (FHL), frequently reiterate the railway's averted demolition, romanticizing its dereliction and history as a post-industrial ruin, recalling how workersvisited the industrial artifacts of their history at the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris (Hollier, 1990). In 2000, at a pivotal moment in the debate over the High Line's future, Robert Hammond, artist and the co-founder of FHL, invited Sternfeld to photograph the abandoned structure. Sternfeld accessed the previously off-limits site with permission from its owner, CSX Railroad (Sternfeld, 2001: 55; David, 2007). The images were published in 2001 and first shown publicly at Pace Wildenstein Gallery— half a block away from the High Line—that same year. Though Sternfeld encouraged maintaining the High Line in its 2000–2001 state, he also offered his photographs of the structure to be sold at an art auction to benefit FHL's campaign for transforming the railroad into a park. Since then, his photographs have routinely galvanized FHL's fundraising campaigns and public support (de Monchaux, 2005; FHL, 2001). These photographs form a supplement to the High Line's development, evoking its precarious past to regulate its future.

Viewers encounter these images as publicity, books sold on-site, and reference material during official High Line walking tours, the photographs compelling a visualization of the High Line's romantic history within thephysical space of its encounter (Vincent, 2001). Furthermore, the landscape firm Field Operations, with architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, worked from Sternfeld's photographs, emphasizing the High Line's rails and weeds as design elements, naming sections of the structure after its "indigenous" flora, visually naturalizing the railway's renovation as a product of time and weather. Over the course of the High Line's development, its organization of such photography, the publication of architectural plans and renderings, and the recent publicity video of the Hudson Yards development, have stressed the transparency of the High Line's development process and figuration, rendering the process of development as self-evident, publicly driven, and inevitable, while occluding the invisible hand of public policy, zoning, and the upwardly mobile classes of the community (Arak, 2010; Davies, 2011; Diller et al., 2011).

Indeed, FHL founders Joshua David and Robert Hammond observe, this project "has always been driven by images" (FHL, 2008: 7). Across the High Line's image bank of Sternfeld's photographs, their consistently contemplative character invokes a dialectic fundamental to modernity. A grammar of rural fragility and untamed nature contends with urban development, offering a prelapsarian sanctuary of pre-industrialization to contain the psychic surplus of metropolitan anxiety (Gopnik, 2001: 48–9). Sternfeld has offered an earnest plea that "if they save the High Line, they'll save some of the virgin parts, so that people can have this kind of hallucinatory experience of nature in the city" (Gopnik, 2001: 51).

Yet nature is fundamentally an epistemological category: nowhere is this clearer than the endless maintenance required to grow wild grasses in plant beds nested between the reclaimed rail tracks. A botanical archive of marginal flora previously grown wild on the High Line and displaced by its redevelopment is now carefully cultivated by gardeners and photography. Sternfeld's individual photographs are a study of lush detail—enabled by his use of a large-format 8 x 10 camera with a fast lens—enticing the eye to linger over a profusion of wildflowers and weeds. While buildings— industrial and postmodern—and the railroad's steel tracks crowd the frame, wayward weeds overrun their strict lines and sharp angles. Foliage and sky dominate the photographs, and their depth of field draws the viewer into the image, each one a balanced landscape composition suspending figurative representation in favor of broader vistas (Sternfeld, 2001).

These decisions are deliberate; Sternfeld's oeuvre is varied, ranging from street photography shot on small- and medium-format cameras to iPhone photography of commercial shopping culture in Dubai. His choice of camera and language play up the visual conventions of their subjects, and the use of a larger format for the High Line quotes conventions of modern landscape photography. These conventions are themselves dependent on the picturesque genre of painting. For historian David Marshall, the emergence of the 18th-century picturesque genre in British landscape painting helped constitute modern ways of seeing, particularly for well-traveled, landed gentry. Its emergence and popularity were fully coincident with Western European discoveries, studies, and travels into lands and worlds defined as natural or untouched. The picturesque’s visual habitus and epistemology organized a variety of sensibilities, tastes, and class positions, in addition to modes of perception and belonging (Marshall, 2002: 414).

For Marshall, the picturesque aesthetic denotes a kind of rough beauty: fallen ruins, wilderness, forgotten and unknown territories. The execution of such wildness nonetheless depends on a certain elegance and canny detail, particularly in the treatment of ruined and crumbled remains of antiquity, where detailed foregrounds gradually give way to horizon lines merging land and sky in the background. This, Marshall opposes to the affects and techniques of the sublime (2002: 415). The latter's most characteristic German Romantic painters, such as Caspar David Friedrich, incorporated architectural ruins into the sublime's rugged, awe-inspiring landscapes, whose painterly treatment deliberately obscured details and engulfed the human figure to overwhelm the viewer.

While these two modes of representation were sometimes held apart, photography of the High Line derives from, and reinvents, both to awe and stabilize a transhistorical viewing subject. We are drawn into Sternfeld's images by their depth of field. The photographs often focus on the foreground, at times the architecture of buildings, with the middle ground slightly blurry, sometimes dissipating into mist, immersing the viewer ascharacteristic of the sublime. The lush foregrounds require the photographer and the viewer's visual immersion follows his eye, the image scaled to the viewer, who neither drifts nor loses orientation.

In other photographic projects, Sternfeld has sought to distance himself from the picturesque, the beautiful, and the sublime. For instance, his Oxbow Archive series documents the harmful effects of human consumption on landscape through a soft palette and flat images (Sternfeld, 2008). Line, a larger depth of field and emphasis on detail is apparent, while the perspective centers the viewer's sovereignty within a picturesque frame. Railings and buildings flanking funneling our gaze into a visual alley, to converge in a central vanishing point or horizon. In spite of Sternfeld’s claim to a vertiginous experience, the High Line’s imagery and rhetoric effect a sense of awe and discovery while carefully directing the eye.

John Stilgoe, an essayist in Sternfeld’s Walking the High Line, asks, “Did not discovery demean the discovered?” However, he abandons the critical point of the picturesque's colonizing aspects to extol the private wonders of discovery’s accident (Stilgoe, 2001: 45). Stilgoe opposes our present techno-modernity to a nostalgia for a prelapsarian past, positioning the High Line experience of the “real” world—an antidote to the unsatisfying discoveries of online worlds, digital interfaces, passengers” persists in his account: no train passengers, no excuse for trespassing, no access, no perimeters “but the air itself” (2001: 44). The High Line’s sublime depopulation, pitting man against the universe, is also a particularly North American formulation. Sternfeld’s work may be seen against the history of picturesque painters of the Hudson River School, whose sweeping landscape panoramas memorialized the nation's industrial history, fertile abundance, and right of passage through formerly Native territories.

The viewer's incursions through virgin territory are framed and enabled by the picturesque, itself a journey bound up in image, wealth, and property accumulation, and kin to Neil Smith’s (1996) account of gentrification's scripting as frontier. Smith describes the narratives of economic progress, Manifest Destiny, the romance of danger, profitable opportunity, and class superiority, which organize policy and property advances into low- income neighborhoods. This trajectory would connect the High Line to the earlier development of the East Village and Lower East Side in Manhattan. Popularity during the 1980s under Ronald Reagan’s administration, she argues that landscape imagery’s commodification extolled a dream of pure, unmediated encounter with the wilderness—a reprieve from the strictures of urban work and a sustenance of the American Dream’s frontier freedoms. The High Line’s rhetoric of freedom echoes these themes, and the years of its development converge with the former Bush administration’s forms of spatial control, embrace of neoliberal capitalism, and the war on terror (Harvey, 2006: 41–50).

The rhetorical freedoms of the liberal bourgeois subject are advanced through images consistently downplaying figuration and labor—a conjunction previously examined in the art of Manet and the Impressionists in post- 1860s Paris, in T. J. Clark’s account of modern manufacturing industries and emerging forms of recreation. Clark observes that the depictions of such spheres of activity by the Parisian avant-garde often conformed to a “rule of representing industry, but not labour [sic], in landscape, the factories a guarantee of their belonging tothe landscape: Railways, in particular, were an ‘ideal subject,’ because its artifacts could so easily be imagined as self-propelled or self-sufficient” (Clark, 1989: 189–90). Extricating the railway from trade and transport, and depicting countryside as the city’s foil and frame, was itself a performance of class, as Clark describes the bourgeois art market support for paintings illuminating rural experience as independent of political economy and human labor.

Transposing Clark’s questions to the High Line clarifies the fetish of industrial structures in Sternfeld’s photographs, and their subsequent reference as floating signifiers and design elements, divorced from the material conditions of maintenance labor, public and industrial transportation. This elision of working-class, dirty, and dangerous work interpolates an upwardly mobile American middle class visiting the High Line for horticultural excursions. At present, while political rhetoric promotes American manufacturing and industry (the latter vanishing under the conditions of the current economic crisis), their compensatory visual analogue appears in the High Line’s re-industrialized aesthetics and rhetoric of pastoral plenitude.

The social implications of witnessing such images may be described by Stallabrass—following Clark’s work—formulates as the urban pastoral. Coined to describe artistic practices in Britain in the early 1990s, the term describes art that either sought out rural idylls or treated the urban landscape with a perspective generally assigned to bucolic country experience (Stallabrass, 1999). For Stallabrass, the pastoral attitude both cultivates and arises from the gentrification and displacement of lower-income people in the city, allowing the bourgeois (or in New York City, the yuppie or hipster) to feel safe in historically racialized communities or poor neighborhoods. The pastoral is itself “a product and an expression of the act of that safety” (1999: 245).

More than a subject, painterly or photographic genre, the urban pastoral is an attitude and epistemological organization of space, where photographic and pictorial points of view are often distanced or panoramic. Such a manner of depicting urban space, Stallabrass observes, is akin to “the archaeological remains of some disaster or the passing of an era.” As examples, he cites photographic tendencies that picture warehouses, streets, and lights, with sufficient distance and nostalgia to abstract detail that could otherwise render delectation more uncomfortable (Stallabrass, 1999: 248).

In the High Line, the structure’s proximity to the Hudson River and Meatpacking District calls forth the historical dangers of the site: corpses that fill the river, the abattoirs and meat trucks, the piers as a historic home, sexual playground, and social space for homeless, gay and transgender communities, and avant-garde artists, who are often invoked to sustain Gotham’s myth. Yet the telling of these stories enacts a form of symbolic appropriation, enabled by post-Giuliani quality-of-life policing activities. Quality-of-life policing targets non-offenses such as standing, congregating, sleeping, in addition to minor offenses such as graffiti, panhandling, littering, and unlicensed street vending. Coupled with a zero-tolerance approach favoring arrests over warnings, the broader criminalization of vagrancy, poverty, delinquent subcultures, and public sexual activity results in the targeting of people of color, and those of nonconforming gender and sexual orientation (INCITE, 2010). The legends of marginalized populations furnish the district’s appeal, while the consumption of these narratives establishes what Clark (1989: 231) previously described as an “imaginary distance and control,” which here accelerates their subjects’ economic and geographic displacement.

Such myth-making is evidenced in the social organization of vision and photography on the High Line. The sexuality of the piers and sex clubs is increasingly displaced to windows of the luxury Standard Hotel, built directly above the first phase of the High Line, where tour guides voyeuristically point visitors to hotel windows for the chance of seeing risqué activity. While scopophilia is encouraged, actual sexual culture is not: the park’s early closing hours are prohibitive, and the High Line’s recently opened second phase overlooks the alley where gay leather bar The Eagle is situated, thus discouraging sexual activity in what was traditionally a cruising zone for gay men. This venue was also recently raided by police on the same day a bill legalizing same-sex marriage was passed in New York State (Baker and Meenan, 2011).

The resuscitation of Stonewall-era policing is not, however, to do with general homophobia or an attack on the liberal gay marriage campaign in the United States. The recent raid is more likely linked to the property developer Avalon beginning construction on their West Chelsea condominiums across the street from the bar (Jeremiah, 2011). The latter’s clientele and activity potentially offer unwanted sights for both the luxury apartments and High Line park visitors. The raid on The Eagle may also be connected to the raids and closure of Black gay and transgender bar ChiChiz earlier in 2011, an escalating series of policing actions that are symptomatic of the West Village, Chelsea, and Meatpacking District’s further gentrification.

Pushbacks to gentrification in the West Village have emerged from a range of queer nonprofits organizing in Chelsea against racialized, sexualized, and classed forms of policing and displacement (Greenfield, 2010). Such state apparatuses of control have historically been strengthened by homonormative liberalism that endorses economic neoliberalism, property accumulation, and police dependency, “barricading” rather than expanding queer safety and sociality (Hanhardt, 2008: 75). Following Gayatri Spivak’s famous distinction between Vertretung (political representation by proxy) and Darstellung (appearance or portraiture), we may understand the distribution of queer space around the High Line as a representational shunting of sexual space to portraiture rather than spatial practice. This enables the cultivation of an image of sexual culture as substitute for its structural dissipation (in Harasym, 1990).

The closure of social space is amplified by the engineering of social congregation in the new park, which mobilizes photography as a technique of its management. Park volunteers photograph visitors, encouraging them to contribute to the High Line's Flickr pool (FHL Flickr, 2011)—whose range appears rather generic and homogeneous, with strong echoes of Sternfeld's photography in visitors' choices of views and perspectives, in part conditioned by the park itself. Contrary to its rhetoric of discovery, the park's lookout points direct camera-armed observers to specific positions within the park, prohibiting picture-taking in certain areas while encouraging it in others. Camera positions that potentially block the High Line's narrow passageways are forbidden, externalizing the park as scenic, uninterrupted image-flow.

Both image production and public passage are carefully directed, and the masses self-managed under the scrutiny of the luxury property owners overlooking the High Line, the shortage of entry/exit points, priority access points for condominium residents, and a forcibly unidirectional linear passage compelling the body from point to point—there is no dérive, or possibility of drift (Goh, 2011). The regulation of amateur photography supports a broader socialization of park surveillance, which includes the prevalence of security cameras, persistent Parks Enforcement Patrol presence, a high number of quality-of-life infractions (largely for drinking), and a general sense of being "strenuously policed" since the High Line's reopening (Wilson, 2011).

Supporters of the High Line frequently praise the park for its well-mannered sociality, seeing it as exemplary of both civic imagination and the triumphant legacy of Rudy Giuliani's 1990s war on crime; however, this also justifies the criminalization of public sex and perceptions of "unruly behavior," youth culture, and vagrancy (Benfield, 2011; Langdon, 2011). The metrics calculating the High Line's success (including high attendance, low crime, controlled noise levels) are modern categories that have previously been used to target poor, queer, and racially marked persons as raucous, criminal, and antisocial, thus distributing and delimiting access to public space. Here, the behavior of policing and methods of quantitative study install—as virtuous and decent—increasingly restrictive forms of subjectivity and public sociality, as auxiliaries of neoliberalism's social and structural inequality (Duggan, 2003; Warner, 2000).

These spatial constraints do not dissuade New Yorkers, who flock to the High Line regardless. Sociologist Sharon Zukin observes that the High Line and the "elite parks" of New York City (which include Central Park, Bryant Park, and the Brooklyn Bridge Park) have grown in popularity since September 11. She argues that spending time out of doors, socializing on roofs and "traffic-calming islands" have emerged as responses to the city's tumult—a point corroborated by Sternfeld, who describes the High Line as a "small post-September 11 miracle" (Sternfeld, 2001: 55; Zukin, 2010). This is most apparent in the billboard of Sternfeld's photograph of the High Line's lush isolation, looming next to one of the most congested and restrictive points of passage on the High Line.

Such a space consoles its public in wartime years and economic crisis, while dismantling the constitution of the public sphere itself by increasing that public's capacity to endure and advance surveillance. Bodies are amassed for the gaze of others, as the few sites of congregation (e.g., the High Line amphitheater overlooking 17th Street) divide the public by height and mirrored glass. Those who approach the window may only use it as a screen—the public is presented to itself as picture.

Part II

When the social is hypostatized and enshrined as an ideal of transparency, whenit itself becomes commodified in a form of sheer administration (better service,better control), the interval between the real and the image[/] or between thereal and the rational shrinks to the point of unreality. (Trinh, 1990)

In the ensuing images, bodies and space distort as an effect of the GigaPan, a robotic camera mount used with digital cameras and software, to create ultra-high resolution panoramic images by capturing and stitching together multiple photographs. Such devices are programmed to provide—under ideal, static conditions—high-resolution panoramic landscapes, affording a wealth of detail for interactive scrutiny and monitored exploration (GigaPan, 2011). Google Earth, an exemplary instance of such technology's use for mapping and surveillance, aggregates a collection of user-generated images into a high-resolution panoramic world picture. As it amasses the work of tourists, amateurs, and professionals to yield the world's largest landscape photograph, the individual is modulated as participant in the control society's photographic apparatus, and the spectacle's commodification of life (Deleuze, 1992).

Using the GigaPan's panoramic machinery and against Google Earth's aspiration to a world image, these photographs convolute the automation of omniscience and prolong the interval of photography's constitution of public space, and the public itself. The GigaPan's process of shooting multiple images in a grid and stitching them together is paradoxically used to disaggregate both body and architecture: buildings warp in space, disembodied heads peer over railings, torsos pair with about-facing legs, shadows appear without physiques. The public sphere appears here in phantasmatic form, as we invoke theorizations of public sphere and democracy as phantoms, against the calcification of their concept and materialization, and to accentuate their incompleteness (Robbins, 1993).

The public sphere's ungrounded character is crucial, particularly within a media environment of ubiquitous photographic and televisual imagery. As Tom Keenan (2002) observes, when the "specter of the camera" appears to haunt our consciousness as a privileged figure of ethical consciousness and responsibility, imagery itself cannot be received with "assumptions of reason and self-evidence" but instead must be studied with persistent attention to "their continual interpretation, appropriation and reinterpretation." The GigaPan is here appropriated against its use as a technique of stabilizing and evidencing space. Instead, it renders here, as phantom, the public bodies and spaces it claims to represent.

This poetry of machines may be elaborated by Dziga Vertov's kino-eye, or, the "high-speed eye," a revolutionary theory of cinema by Vertov and his interlocutors that sought to resist the visual epistemology and affective structure of Hollywood cinema. As a bid for collective consciousness and capacity—most famously articulated in Man With a Movie Camera(1929)—Vertov's new documentary cinema broke with narrative time through a principle of montage, emphasizing the space between distinct shots, advocating the interval and the possibility of a discontinuous non-image. This politico-aesthetic project is described by Annette Michelson as, "that philosophic phantasm of reflexive consciousness: the eye seeing, apprehending itself as it constitutes the world's visibility: the eye transformed by the revolutionary project into an agent of critical projection" (1983: xix).

Invoking the self-reflexive, discontinuous mode of image-production of Vertov's kino-eye may seem anachronistic. Yet within contemporary digital and networked conditions of production and circulation, it is necessary to interrupt the assumption of simultaneity, naturalism, and velocity in the digital filmic and photographic image stream, and emphasize instead the contractions and length of representational time. Taken as a series, the sequence of images in Part I of this article, taken on a square-format camera, afford a space between photography and cinema, as their sequence approaches a film strip. This second series, taken with a GigaPan, mimes a horizontal landscape format while emphasizing the negative space framing the image and the warped limits of its borders.

Almost a century later, this follows the appropriation and depoliticization of the historical avant-garde's forms as FHLinvoke montage forms in their own self-presentation. Their website reproduces a mural collaged from the High Line Portrait Project, a collaboration between FHL, Fujifilm, and photographer Tom Kletecka, featuring over 800 portraits of High Line supporters in front of a backdrop of a Sternfeld photograph. The portraits were collaged into murals on construction fencing around the High Line in 2007 to raise visibility prior to the park's opening (Duiser, 2007; FHL Flickr, 2011).

FHL, since forming as a non-profit advocacy group for the railway's preservation in 1999, has since become a private partner to the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, and their publicity photograph montages numerous individual portraits in a broader visual field. In the High Line Portrait Project, statements from supporters depict the organization and its stakeholders as guardians of responsible and civic life, liberal gender diversity, and multiculturalism (FHL, 2007; FHL Flickr, 2011). Such a pluralist use of photomontage draws equivalences without difference, contradiction, or the possibility of a non-image, and naturalizes the composition of the image-world and its subjects, an accomplice to the totalizing eye of the panorama.

The High Line offers a view of the city's recent celebrity architectural projects—including Frank Gehry's IAC building, the Polshek Partnership's Standard Hotel, Jean Nouvel's 100 W 11th Ave—themselves participants in the rezoning of Chelsea and the Meatpacking District. For theorist Dean MacCannell, the tourist's desire for authentic experience is cultivated by organizers of tourist attractions, producing what he terms staged-authenticity. While tourist sites are agglomerations of stories that, over time, contribute to their claims to authenticity, the "stories-in-reserve" that tourists seek to experience are generally repackaged and approximated to ensure their appeal (MacCannell, 1976). Given the temporal structure and global market drives of tourist economies, tourist sites often reproduce a fragment of these stories in reduced and conservative form, occluding their dense and contradictory aspects.

Indeed, the narrative of the High Line as a "pasture in the sky" is elsewhere more cynically described as an architectural Disneyland simulation, given the neighborhood's thorough rebranding and boutique shops, reminiscent of the Parisian Second Empire's emergent commodity culture—"a culture in which the display of goods was surpassed only by the display of the people in the street who came to look at them and at each other" (Rice, 1997: 38). Introduced in 1820, gas lighting stimulated nocturnal strolling and complemented the late store hours, popular promenades, and bourgeois street life characteristic of Haussmannization. These have also become key elements of the High Line's neighborhood development of the Meatpacking District—albeit regulated with stricter park curfews—and real estate values are expected to inflate 12–15 percent across retail, commercial, and residential forms of property (Sternbergh, 2007).

As the High Line ushers in restrictions on urban activity and a class of upwardly mobile inhabitants, its developments build upon primary displacements which have already occurred, consequently driving—and greenwashing—secondary displacement and dispossession of the working poor. Following the postwar redirection of municipal funds away from the urban centers toward the burgeoning suburbs, New York City in the 1950s and 1960s endured widespread neglect by politicians, discriminatory practices of financial institutions, and property abandonment by landlords. In some neighborhoods, the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) owned over 60 percent of vacant properties through tax foreclosure, culminating in the city's infamous bankruptcy in 1975 (Deutsche and Ryan, 1984: 97). Following the defeat of the Artist Home Ownership Program in the Lower East Side, the demolition of the Tompkins Square Park band shell, and the violent eviction of the 13th Street squats in the East Village, in 1996 the city began rebuilding those demolished areas to attract business and investment (Lueck, 1996). As higher-rent tenants moved in, the art world that emerged there moved to Chelsea in search of new affordable gallery spaces.

This process was aided by HPD, which had developed a new policy that rapidly turned over properties in tax foreclosure to qualifying developers, thus eliminating city-owned vacant property altogether (City of New York, 2011). Consequently, the city relieved itself of the demand to provide social housing by creating conditions that privileged individual rights of property over the basic rights of those who lacked access to decent housing and adequate means of subsistence. This policy increased inequality by concentrating wealth in the most desirable of these districts—including those with an established cultural life—and by creating concentrated areas of economic activity driven by luxury consumption and real estate speculation, and the accommodations of art and liberal politics.

This process reached its culmination in the West Village and in Chelsea, neighborhoods flanking the High Line. But by the time the park's plans were developed, the war of position against the neighborhood's poorest residents had long passed (Deutsche and Ryan, 1984: 93). By 1999, the year FHL was formed, household median income in these two neighborhoods was over 161.9 percent of the average for New York City and 147.6 percent of the average for the country (US Census Bureau, American Factfinder, 1999). Those members of the working-class and bohemian communities who were not fortunate enough to become property owners in decades preceding the mid-1990s were (and still are) concentrated in public and subsidized housing, squeezed by the secondary effects of a second-order of gentrification.

This round of gentrification is first focused on the development of public space, as opposed to private living spaces and traditional spaces of consumption. The development of public space is proposed and supported by a rhetoric advocating future financial benefit to the city at large and investment value, increasing the exchange value of the real property acquired under the first order of gentrification and further concentrating wealth and class power geographically. Although the High Line was built with public monies in the 1930s, it was privately owned until 2005 (FHL, 2011a). And in the 1990s, the Chelsea Property Owners Group (CPO), a coalition of property owners with land beneath the rail and rights to the air above it, lobbied (largely out of public sight) for the structure's demolition and for the development of high-rises in its place.

In order to secure the High Line's future, prevent its demolition and any subsequent high-rise development, FHL formed a public-private partnership with the newly elected Bloomberg administration. The primary goal was to remake the rail as public—in name, at least—to increase private capital. This process has resulted in a space owned by a public agency but managed by a private entity. But the public here was overwhelmingly composed of a circumscribed group of residents who secure the area's property value: wealthy property owners with interests far afield from those of the area's working-class tenants, homeless youth, and pensioners.

In 2003, the Department of City Planning announced the Special West Chelsea Redistricting, a plan allowing landowners under the High Line, the CPO, to sell air rights to residential developers between 10th and 11th Avenues, to "ease the railway's renovation into an elevated public park" (Michaud, 2003). In return, the elevated rail would be preserved, at an exorbitant development cost. Thus, the initial goal of the FHL—its rejection of high-rise development—was abandoned in a Faustian bargain. Moreover, the apparent compromise has enormously benefited the neighborhood's property-owning residents, the core membership of the FHL. In spite of the recent economic crisis, the median list price for a home in the vicinity of the High Line rose from $870,000 to $1,300,000 between October 2008 and June 2009 at the opening of the first section of the new park (Zillow, 2011).

The role of Chelsea's art galleries in this process has been vital. The Special West Chelsea Redistricting has guaranteed the art galleries concentrated within an eight-block stretch below the High Line a form of property security, with restrictions on the lots' future use (Sicha, 2003). These tenants, whose lucrative businesses encourage tourist dollars and cultural hegemony for the city, became, not surprisingly, one of the primary sources of support for the renovation of the rail and the efforts of the FHL. In addition to Pace Wildenstein Gallery, Mary Boone Gallery, for example, supported the efforts by hosting a benefit auction featuring works by artists such as Christo, Alexis Rockman, Tom Sachs, and Sternfeld (Vincent, 2002). FHL also co-hosted the annual block party organized by the experimental performance space The Kitchen in 2005, 2007, and 2009 (see e.g. FHL, 2005).

The successful collaboration between the art world and the FHL relies on the hegemony of a commodity-driven cultural sector only distantly related to the cultural sectors of the previous decades. In the 1980s, for instance, the appearance of artists and art galleries in a neighborhood were bellwethers of gentrification. The East Village, once a very run-down area, is a case in point; it now possesses some of the most expensive downtown real estate. In Chelsea, however, gentrification preceded the High Line, although its presence will no doubt intensify it, as the Special West Chelsea Redistricting further secured this order, promising increasing foot traffic for the galleries and rents for the landlords. While the commercial gallery industry participates in various forms of rezoning and gentrification, artists are also frequently evicted as a result, and in the past two years their rights to public space have been challenged in parks such as the High Line, Battery Park, Union Square, and high-traffic sections of Central Park (Chen, 2010; Hernandez, 2010).

Since 2009, Michael Bloomberg's administration has pitted the scarcity of green space against artistic freedoms by attempting to limit the number of artist vendors, renaming them “expressive matter” vendors and reducing their numbers through permit requirements. Expressive matter as a category includes paintings, books, and photography, which, at the time of writing, are materials also displayed publicly by the High Line. On the structure itself, the staff promote publications of Sternfeld's photographs and Diller Scofidio + Renfro's architectural designs, recommendations which participate in streamlining the appropriate sites, interpretations, and ideas of art (FHL, 2010).

The rights to circulating ideas in public parks are increasingly defined by the public-private partnerships of parks themselves. Artist vendors on the High Line and elsewhere have contested the city's attempt to restrict art vending, citing First Amendment rights protecting freedom of speech. While many of the artists vending on the High Line are not artists whose work circulates within mainstream discourses of contemporary art, Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento observes that the effects of policing “street” or “folk artists” have broader repercussions for all kinds of artistic practices, and the legal regulation and definition of artists’ speech as commercial speech risks shrinking the category of art to increasingly reductive legal definitions and market logic (Parallel Lines, 2010). At risk are the territorial character of physical public space, the contraction of art as a space for democratic debate, the limits of its definition, and freedoms of expression.

The spatial contradictions presented by the High Line—community-driven comfort in surveillance and restricted public use, the normalization of public-private partnerships and zoning packages, the shrinking space of artistic speech even as districts are zoned to protect its commercial industry—point to profound anxieties regarding the question of public space itself. Anthony Vidler's psychoanalytic reading of architecture describes the role of objects and spaces in initiating phobias and anxieties, particularly the emergence of agoraphobia as a pathological category in the late 19th century, amidst accounts of psychological states particular to the modern metropolis. Vidler identifies phobias such as agoraphobia, or its corollary, claustrophobia, as anxieties of modern city life, and considers their significance within larger processes of remapping city space for both modernist urban planners who believed “primitive psychological regressions should be overcome,” and for countermodernists who wielded the language of the new phobias to combat restrictive modernist forms of planning (Vidler, 2000).

While agoraphobia denotes the fear of non-enclosed spaces such as public plazas, it is also classed within a broader range of anxieties. Vidler (2000: 28–30) recounts French psychiatrist Legrand du Saulle’s description of spatial fears of voids in theatres, churches, or points of view overlooking courtyards and countryside, and the feminist revisions of agoraphobia to emphasize the domestic and symbolic structures examined by women analysts such as Helene Deutsch and Julia Kristeva. While agoraphobia points to a variety of (gendered) public venues, it is also a response to transitional spaces of the threshold to the salon, the apartment, the window and street, the uncertain boundaries between private and public space, and the impossibility of stabilizing public space, intrinsic to modern life (Vidler, 2000: 46–50).

Since the 1980s and 1990s, critiques of modernist notions of public space have been re-evaluated by postmodernist feminist critiques of vision in art and art history. In Rosalyn Deutsche’s Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics, the author contends with the criticisms of political economy that assume its primacy as a ground for theories of public space. Her essay “Agoraphobia” breaks with the easy divisions of public and private space, outdoor public art and art in galleries, all founded on particular notions of publicness and, consequently, democracy. Deutsche recalls philosopher of radical democracy Claude Lefort’s contention that “The hallmark of democracy... is the disappearance of certainties about the foundations of social life,” whereby democratic public space is neither a physical space, nor a conventional site of public debate or issues established as public. Rather, democracy is “the legitimacy of debate about what is legitimate and what is illegitimate,” crucially sustained by the antagonism at the heart of the social that opens onto public space (Deutsche, 1998: 273–4).

For Deutsche, radical democracy and its corollary of public space are founded in the non-closure of the social—consequently, those who speak of democracy and public space will have appropriated both to authoritarian ends if either concept is founded on essential social unities, which include “eternal human needs, the organic configuration and evolution of cities, inevitable technological progress, natural social arrangements, or objective moral values” (1998: 275). The new elite parks, while appropriating forms of community organizing and populist rhetoric associated with public space, are perhaps profoundly fearful of democracy, anxious in the face of its ungrounded character, and the potential for conflict that inaugurates urban public space itself.

Following Robbins, Deutsche contends that the public sphere is crucial to democracy not in spite of, but because of its phantasmatic character—which opens its very concept and composition to antagonism (1998: 324). Here, Deutsche turns to an analysis of images to consider the question of subjectivity in representation, and the constitution of the public. The aesthetic questions of how identities and publics are organized, sensed, and made legible were previously raised in the exhibition Public Vision (1982) at the White Columns gallery, which presented the work of artists Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, and Barbara Kruger. Known for their critique of transcendent visual neutrality and stress of the contingent relation between image and viewer, today these artists would also appear in discourses of high art’s upward mobility.

Contemporary art—and its history—have since been marshaled by the High Line to endorse its development. The High Line organizes an art commission series, occasionally working in partnership with neighboring institutions on various projects. These include the Whitney Museum, which will occupy a site adjacent to the southernmost end of the High Line, and which recently collaborated with the High Line on performances of paradigmatic works from the 1960s and 1970s, such as Trisha Brown’s Roof Piece of 1971 (Lindquist, 2011). The High Line also draws on the history of its location, as the piers and the West Side have long been crucial to New York City’s history and avant-garde art history, in addition to a ground for critical accounts of urban resistance and alternative community (Crimp, 2010; Lee, 1999).

The convergence of high art and the High Line’s surrounding areas nonetheless provides a discursive site where art practices may be read against their grain—to solicit different kinds of rewards, challenge the terms of their present articulation, and redirect their appropriation. The interaction between conceptual practices and critical urbanism in New York City would include Hans Haacke’s famous institutional critique of real estate values in Shapolsky et al: Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 (1971); the anti-gentrification aspects of Group Material’s Democracy project (1989–91); and Gordon Matta-Clark’s Day’s End (1975), where dramatic architectural cuts were cleaved into the forsaken light industry warehouses on the waterfront.

The broader visual culture of the city would also include Alvin Baltrop’s photographs of gay sex on the piers, queer radical history and subcultural life, and their flashing up in the work of younger activists, particularly with regard to Baltrop’s photographs of transgender activists such as Sylvia Rivera, who slept on the waterfront, sex workers, and S&M practitioners tricking by the meat trucks. For instance, queer youth organizing group FIERCE has called upon the legacy of Baltrop’s imagery and Rivera’s organizing with STAR (Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries), to advance their claim upon territory and time: access to the piers, later curfews, free bathroom access, and affordable food (FIERCE, 2008, 2010).

The High Line’s success also partly capitalizes on a rhetoric of community and participatory forms of art. FHL’s news releases often describe the project in terms of community organizing, and artist Pablo Helguera recently organized performances of protest songs on the site. A critique of the limits of the social, and of representation, remains crucial—particularly from within its most seemingly complicit locations (FHL, 2011b). In response to the question of how artists, previously outside the institution, could critique the institutions that they have become, as well as respond to the institutionalization of their critical positions, Andrea Fraser contends:

It's not a question of being against the institution: we are the institution. It’s a question of what kind of institution we are, what kind of values we institutionalize, what forms of practice we reward, and what kinds of rewards we aspire to. (Fraser, 2005: 282)

Addressing the problem of the “we” that constitutes the institution and spectatorship of contemporary art along the High Line, during the fall of 2010 Barbara Kruger presented an installation on the Whitney’s building site adjacent to the High Line’s Gansevoort entrance. Kruger printed texts the size of billboards addressing the High Line viewer as a viewer of art—whose spectatorship is entangled with the High Line’s ongoing gentrification. Across a fence running the length of the Whitney’s construction site, bold white capital letters on a black ground declaim the progression of the site’s chronological and material development from abattoir to fashion capital: From Blood, To Meat, To Leather, To Flesh, To Silk. A former warehouse adjacent to the High Line near its southernmost entrance is covered with key words dryly denoting the museum and art industry’s involvement in neighborhood gentrification—Real Estate. Art. Money. Sex.

At one of the High Line’s multiple vantage points, where billboards generally crowd viewers with advertising, Kruger repurposed the medium and rhetoric of fine art’s transcendence and dehistoricization, a discourse that often cooperates with private interests. In a public service announcement of sorts, her text declaims: Art is as heavy as sorrow, as light as a breeze, as bright as an idea, as pretty as a picture, as funny as money, and as fugitive as fraud. At stake is Kruger’s undoing of the viewer’s comfort in her aesthetic experience, and her strenuous insistence on visual pleasure’s constitution by techniques of vision, vectors of gender, money, power, and class. These substitute self-assured platitudes for critical witnessing and a more democratic distribution of pleasure—You are not what you seem. You’re more complicated, more serious, kinder, calmer and a true friend.