Writings | Walking the High Line

High is to New York what wet is to Venice—the necessary condition that has become the romantic condition. To be up, and above, those still felt as imprisonment in too many office-closeted lives, can, with the addition of a breeze or an eccentricity, become an escape, a source of renewal, and even provide a feeling of belonging. In Manhattan, to look down is not always to look down on. It is a communal experience, with something of the feeling of sailors and the crow's nest looking at other sailors, the Fellowship of the air—not avoiding the storm, exactly, but at least sharing the news of it early. Moguls in the spires of skyscrapers stare at other moguls, and millionaire actors wave across the park at other millionaire actors, and tourists go to the top of the World Trade Center to gaze with binoculars at tourists in the crown of the Statue of Liberty, and, if people crowned the Brooklyn Bridge, it is not to jump but to admire the falcons’ scrape on one of the towers, an enviable home up high. When Superman is spotted in the sky above the city, people think mildly that he might be something else, a bird or plane… The archaeology of Manhattan is reversed: the past is not buried in the ground but held up in the air on the upper floors. You see old things clearly: ghostly unlit Longchamp signs and forgotten Dec-Aztec Metal detailing on abandoned penthouse nightclubs. In New York, the overhead viewpoint is curiously peaceful and nostalgic—the beautiful vista rather than the sublime. (The sublime vista is subterranean—the No. 6 train approaching the 14th St. station through the gloom, eyes on fire.)

The most peaceful high place in New York right now is a stretch of viaduct called the High Line. The High Line is a derelict elevated railroad track, about two stories high, running a mile and a third along the western edge of the city, from 34th St. to Gansevoort St. It encloses about 8 acres, or half a million square feet, of taffy-pulled, 32-foot wide horizontal space. Many people who pass under it think that it is an old El track. In fact, it is, or was, a New York Central Railroad track, used for 50 years to convey goods from all over America to little shunting among the west-side warehouses. For more than two decades—ever since the last three carloads of frozen turkeys made their transit to Gansevoort Street—it has been under a provisional death sentence, condemned by the property owners caught in its shadow. But one thing or another has kept it from being torn down, and, just recently, it has become a gleam in the eye of some Westside do-gooders, who call themselves the Friends of the High Line, and who see it as a potential midair park! Upper West Side quixotism that would leave the whole city carpeted with moss if left unchecked—but a lot of other local polls, topped off by Senator Clinton, are all for it.

For the momentum, the High Line has gone not to wrack and ruin but to seed: weeds and grasses and even small trees sprout from the track bed. There are irises and lamb’s ears and thistle-tufted onion grass, white-flowering bushes and pink-budded trees and grape hyacinths, and strange New York weeds that shoot straight up with horizontal arms, as tough and electrified. A single, improbable Christmas tree can be found there, and a flock of warblers has made themselves a home, too. In one sheltered stretch between two tall buildings is a stand of hardwood trees. The High Line combines the appeal of those fantasies in which New York has returned to the wild with an almost Zen quality of measured, peaceful distance.

The poet-keeper of the High Line is the photographer Joel Sternfeld. He has been taking pictures of it in all seasons for the year, and he has a gift for seeing light and space and color—the romantic possibility of every kind—where a less sensitive observer sees smudge and weed and ruin. He would not just like the High Line to be saved and made into a promenade—he would like the promenade, as it exists now, to be perpetuated, a piece of New York that it really is. Where many of the High Line’s supporters see it as potential—they are not averse to picturing, in imagery that evokes the airy, weightless, jaunty style of an architect’s rendering, picnic tables, and monorails and sculpture parks—he sees it as a thing already accomplished, and wants to keep it more or less as it is.

Discover deliberately here. Gaze up and around before the climb. Then look out and around, but chiefly along the sinuous ribbon so difficult to designate. Glance down always too, at the decrepitude that snares and trips, at the precipices snickering adjacent. Long-distance marvels hover, draw the eye, fix the attention. Close-up, in the grass, under the snow, lurk the stubby solidity of permanent structure and the detritus of temporary abandonment. Here find a genuine place, a place more route than road, more node than square, more rill than river. Photographs of whatshimmer here? What grimoire harbors the right word? What sort of find is this discovered in these images?

Urban autobiography begins in discovery. But nowadays discovery engenders vexation.In the schoolroom and almost everywhere else, it denotes only the finding of what no one has ever seen or otherwise experienced. In 1992, the meaning suddenly perplexed educators. Children learned that Columbus discovered the New World or America or some sand-spit Caribbean island, but surely the locals who greeted him knew their own location. Did not discovery demean the discovered? Discovery blundered into serious peril by the middle of the 1990s, and now it cowers when it does not hide or sally forth to irritate. John Davys definitely discovered the Falkland Islands in 1592. No humans had ever visited or inhabited the little archipelago before European contact, and nowadays no one begrudges discovery to Davys. But Columbus knew. Almost certainly he visited Iceland in 1477 to hear the sagas retold, if only in fragments. Almost certainly he knew the tales of Inuit shipwrecking on Scottish beaches, of the remarkable strangers whose canoes washed ashore in Spain. He discovered the New World knowing where it must be while masking his intent with talk of the Indies, and discovery properly designates his accomplishment.

It denotes the finding of something already known to others, even to the self. Period. It properly designates the accomplishment of British shipmaster Richard Boyle, who recorded in his Adventures of 1726 that “on 3 November we discover’d England, whose Chalky Cliffs gave us all a vast Delight.” Homeward-bound, Boyle found England more or less where he thought it might be, more or less where he left it, and he used discovery in the King James Version sense of Acts XXI, 3: “Now when we had discovered Cyprus, we left it on the left hand, and sailed into Syria, and landed at Tyre.” Cyprus turned up where seamen expected it, and England turned up at the end of Boyle’s long passage. Discovery means the finding or experiencing of what one knows by direct experience or second-hand information, even by supposition.

It not only denotes first-time finding and ten-thousandth-time ascertaining, it denotes too the uncovering of something private, something frequently hidden. Attorneys and judges know this meaning well. “The disclosure by the defendant of facts, titles, documents, or other things which are in his exclusive knowledge or possession, and which are necessary to the party seeking the discovery as a part of a cause or action pending or to be brought in another court, or as evidence of his rights or title in such proceeding,” runs the 1933 Black’s Law Dictionary definition. Given sufficient grounds demonstrated by a plaintiff or would-be plaintiff, the defendant or would-be defendant must reveal what has been secreted away or closeted or put in a pocket, or maybe hidden in plain view, as Poe explains in The Purloined Letter, the master-guide to steganography. Outside of the law, the meaning profoundly discomforts. Why should the defendant surrender secrets? Do discovery proceedings give unfair advantage to the plaintiff? Here surfaces the concept of equity, itself a whole body of jurisprudence, but one grounded on the most comfortable notion of all. Fairness, right dealing, justice—all such concepts originate in equality before the law; the judge, the jury, and equality demanding a fair sharing of information. Facts must be presented. Documents must not be shredded. Closets must be opened. Structures must be descried.