The High Line

After a decade of bureaucratic wrangling, the High Line has opened along Manhattan's west side. The first section of the abandoned elevated freight railway tracks has been converted to a promenade in the air. (The second section, running north of 20th Street, is still a year away.) Naturally, it's already crowded, as everyone wants to see what all the fuss was about and if it really is, as the Times declared, "one of the most thoughtful, sensitively designed public spaces built in New York in years."

First, a tip: go early. We passed the High Line on Saturday afternoon and it was packed --- in the rain. We went in the morning, thinking we'd have it to ourselves, only to encounter people who'd clearly been lounging up there for hours. But it's easy to see why. The High Line is meticulously conceived and realized, combining the sleek and clean lines of jetset architecture with cultivated wildflowers and bushes, all overlaid with and surrounded by the relics of vanished industry. It provides visitors with a rare perspective on the city, a shifting view at low-rise height that allows you to peer into both hollowed-out warehouses and luxury apartment windows. It is of the street but not on the street.

And that is potentially the High Line's drawback as well. Like the Meatpacking District through which it runs, the High Line presents the remnants of the working class as an aesthetic experience, one carefully contained by slick consumer culture. The triumph of many of New York's parks is that they are truly democratic spaces, but the High Line runs the risk of becoming the balustrade from which bourgeois observers declare our authenticity by virtue of our admiration for long-gone labor. But it's too early to tell whether that will be the case: for now, the High Line is there to be marveled at, with considerable incredulity that it finally happened. How it will be used --- and thus, what it will mean --- is, well, up in the air.