Starting in the Meatpacking District and running almost entirely parallel to the Hudson River into Midtown is the New York City Highline, which, as I discovered last week during NYC’s Climate Week, is much more than a walkway with foliage. The Highline is a former train track for the New York Central Railroad that was just recently repurposed as a linear park.
As world leaders descended upon the city and rallies reverberated through finance districts and central Manhattan for Climate Week NYC 2014, I visited the city’s newest and most popular repurposed park to see how NYC can be green.
The walkway’s past as a railroad blends beautifully with its present as an urban oasis. Linear grooves separate gardens from the walkway and repeat the lines of the train tracks throughout the path, creating consistent design while paying homage to its former life. Where the tracks exist, the human-formed iron is overgrown with a variety of trees, bushes, and flowers, making a beautiful example of urban landscaping and recycling.
The setting is also ideal for various environmental initiatives. Book exchanges, climate change awareness organizations, and animal rights supporters were among the varied causes that table comfortably in the shade on the part of the walkway that runs under The Standard Hotel. Small businesses offered homemade or green-minded refreshments along the path, and the ambiance was that of a local community.
Not to mention, the Highline isn’t only for visitors and tourists. Along the path were café-style tables and chairs, built-in wooden loungers, and wider areas with benches tucked away behind trees or gardens that are ideal for any New Yorker to sit and read or people watch. As you head north, areas of green grass open up for picnics or general idling, creating a the sense of a college quad lawn between high design skyscrapers in the middle of Manhattan.
The architecture that the Highline winds through is impressive. Asymmetric buildings, rooftop gardens, copper-look skyscapers, and edgy apartment buildings seem to have grown around the Highline just as the flowers and trees have. I particularly enjoyed getting a glimpse of a child’s classic bunk bed in a high-concept, slim building that seemed to wind into the sky. Even as the buildings become more abstract, some things are always timeless.
Check out my photos from my Climate Week NYC visit to the Highline:
Photos: Emmie Derback, Nikon 3200, 135mm lens
anchored & adrift 
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