To "EL" and Back

By Peter Fleischer, Executive Director, Empire State Future

On a warm, spring-like day not so long ago, I found myself, a former New Yorker and West Village resident, ascending a spanking new staircase up onto the still new High Line linear park that sits on the edge of my old neighborhood. For me, it was a chance to get reacquainted with a city I knew, but which of course is always changing, and from a completely different perspective and vantage point. I was suddenly off the grid, and looking down on it.

By good luck it was one of those perfect days in New York, when the air was crisp, the humidity low, the temperature neither too hot nor too cold. I joined an uplifted throng, drawn upward by the nice weather no doubt. We strolled between two very different mediums: pure soft blue sky above with just a hint of clouds, and hard tough city below.

We milled, we moved, we brushed shoulders. We lingered at the Plexiglas walls and scanned our surroundings. Native grasses and wildflowers, in places, hid the rails creating the sense and scent of parkland. Odd on infrastructure, odd at elevation, odd in Manhattan anywhere not called Central or Riverside or Fort Tryon Park, but very wavy, and wispy and real.

My fellow lingerers were families with strollers, couples, groups of friends, loners, tourists in clusters. They were speaking English. They spoke with accents. They spoke foreign languages. They wandered and wondered. New Yorkers and visitors blended. Their pace everywhere else so varying, here so similar. Their gape and gaze, normally so different, here the same.

Outside, in the plain air, with a crowded subway platform worth of park strollers, there was none of that tense, pressed, underground or even sidewalk, elbowing and jostling. A new and more elevated form of New York behavior emerged. Awe, appreciation of the new, and the nearly nude (hotel above, mannequins below, and ads all around) made it hard for that stereotypical New York rudeness to manifest itself.

Magically and mysteriously, the old iron rails of the original freight-bearing High Line appeared and disappeared along the route. Back in the day, when America was a great manufacturing nation and Manhattan its pulsing, pumping heart, goods made in New York were loaded on to freight trains at this elevated level. From factories that lined the High Line, trains lumbered to a train yard into a tunnel under the Hudson River, through New Jersey and by rail to a greedy nation, eager for the manufactured goods that came, once upon a time, from Manhattan's industrial core.

Now, these old factories, or facsimiles of them, serve different purposes. Drifting, wandering, scanning, I espied the Trestle on Tenth, a new bar serving the new beating pulse of New York, the nightlife of the Meatpacking District and the galleries of Chelsea. This new core of New York, fashion people, media people, bankers, celebutants, artists, and wanabees, people made by the service and information industries, were now seeing and being seen where people once made things.

Just as the old factories have disappeared, so too have some of the more recent gritty incarnations of this district. Back when I lived near here, a dozen or more meat wholesalers opened daily for business in this meat market district. Animal carcasses hung from metal hooks above the sidewalks where today's visitors shop, cruise, and carouse. Only a few more genteel establishments punctuated the sheen and smell of cut flesh. There was the French diner Florent, an S&M bar, and the not yet trendy or yuppie Hogs and Heifers, the original NYC home of the tough female bartenders that yell at the clientele and dance (clothed, but barely) on the bar. Outside, transsexual prostitutes mingled and waited, proffering their unique cut and taking their dubious slice. The Liberty Inn stood nearby offering views of the not-yet reclaimed west side waterfront, an hour at a time. Above this action, the High Line loomed, overgrown with hardy weeds, providing the needed shadows.

New York, perhaps more than any city on the globe, regularly recycles its parts, and reinvents itself. The cycle of migration, deterioration, abandonment, fallow, rediscovery, creation, and renewal is the quintessence of a city forever evolving. From the High Line, you can see it.