Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Visit NYC's newest neighborhood park, High Line
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
People of New York’s park community, we have the means to banish gloom and doom from our daily lives – go out and enjoy our environment, while the weather is good. Now a new treasure has become available to cheer us up, the High Line park, a former elevated railroad yard, way west, near the Hudson. Take the M14 bus line as far as you can , to 10th Avenue. Looking forward, you will see a superstructure like a bridge, crossing your field of vision, with people walking on it. To join them, trot along 10th Avenue to 16th Street, turn east and you will be at the elevator entrance (other walkup steps are at 20th, 18th, 14th and Gansewoort (appx. 12th) Streets.
Once up, you will be surprised to be on a cement sidewalk with 5 ft. tall grass growing right through it, along the sides, in slots cut near-parallel to the walkway. Beyond the slots, to the edge of the former right-of-way, fenced with strong railings, the tall grass grows freely, interspersed with clumps of yellow Susans, purple rudbeckia, chunks of asters and small oaks, like a wall-to-wall meadow run wild. The walkway is crowded, as thick as 14th Street by the Whole Foods, grownup people, with toddlers in strollers, little kids running wild in surprise, (no dogs allowed) , gawkers on benches, observing the passing scene. The benches are works of art, built of 2x6 or 2x2 wood, freestanding or bolstered by cement buttresses, all different.
Walking north, admiring the view of the city – look, there is a misshapen building, or is that the IAC skyscraper by Frank Gehry? (yes, and his wife, Diane von Furstenburg, has a boutique down on 14th ). At 17th Street, where the rails cross 10th Avenue, there’s a Roman forum terraced with benches to view the traffic, seemingly open–ended at the bottom (a deception, an invisible glass wall protects the kids from dropping on top of the cars); you can view the golden Met insurance spire, and at 18th there is a view of a rooftop park, atop a restaurant aptly mamed The Park. Want to see the Statue of Liberty? At the charming little maple or plane tree grove , also near 18th, there is a sighting to the south, through the leaves . An ocean liner ? The huge Norvegian Spirit just happens to be passing, past the xx dock. A strange wire cage reaching up, high over the river? That’s the golf driving range of Chelsea Piers.
Let’s go back to the Gehry IAC building, which is sort of focal to the whole organized madness concept one senses here. Gehry’s 30 year breakthrough into the world of New York’s glass boxes, it houses Barry Diller’s InterActive Corporation, a media and internet empire. Try to define it? The IAC website flashes a page of cute corporate names, never stopping for a clos view. By adding the excel columns and multiplying by lines, you surmise there are 54 companies, more or less, named Ask.com, Citysearch, evite, bustedtees, CollegeHumor, Zwonky, vimeo, Kazulah, excite, pronto, showbug.com, Won; the mind boggles. It all adds to billions of dollars’ worth of flimflam, none ever splashed in the scandal pages of NYTimes business section. Are thet really more solid than banks? (Scratch that question– everything is.)
Anyway, this mirage fits in with the HighLine concept, created by the architectural firm of Diller Scofidio + Renfro (stet), led by James Corner Field Operations. DS+R gained fame with its 2006 ICA building (confuse not, that’s Institute of Contemporary Art) and its surrounds, in Boston’s Back Bay waterfront milieu, a prototype to NYC’s marvel of grass growing through concrete.
The walk ends soon after 20th street stairs, with a gate, beyond which you see a continuation, cement only, as of now, with a little nursery of plants for the Chelsea Grasslands (an unobtrusive sign someplace proclaims the meadows to be a gift of the Tiffany Foundation).
More experiences on the way back. There’s the jnteresting block of dark red brick mid-19th Century brownstones around a church at 20th Street; a glass wlll structure with white and blue windowshades that shies brightly when the sun comes out,contrasted with sinister warehouses visible down the path. All colors of New York, in a nutshell.ng 14th street steps we enter a covered passageway through a mysterious building in construction , then a long walk leading through a multi-story glass slab with floor to ceiling windows, which turns out to be Andre Balazs’ new Standard Hotel building, 337 rooms, a year old. What a view from there. Oh, yeah? I heard from a cynic, upon return, that exhibitionists rent rooms there and strip buck naked for show (the proud Balazs pastes some fig leaves on the pix and shows them on his web site, anything for a buck. Very a bad taste, man).
The path then continues to another little grove of trees, at the Gansewoort (12th Street) staircase. We return to fashionable 14th Street, no kidding, rich in boutiques, from Hugo Boss to Carlos Mole, with a DWR Design store, where kiddies jump around in Wilberforce Eames’ plastic chairs, still a great design after 50 years. We catch the M14 bus down on 9th Avenue, where an elegant midstreet mall breaks up traffic, just like at Madison Square Park. A day well spent.
People of New York’s park community, we have the means to banish gloom and doom from our daily lives – go out and enjoy our environment, while the weather is good. Now a new treasure has become available to cheer us up, the High Line park, a former elevated railroad yard, way west, near the Hudson. Take the M14 bus line as far as you can , to 10th Avenue. Looking forward, you will see a superstructure like a bridge, crossing your field of vision, with people walking on it. To join them, trot along 10th Avenue to 16th Street, turn east and you will be at the elevator entrance (other walkup steps are at 20th, 18th, 14th and Gansewoort (appx. 12th) Streets.
Once up, you will be surprised to be on a cement sidewalk with 5 ft. tall grass growing right through it, along the sides, in slots cut near-parallel to the walkway. Beyond the slots, to the edge of the former right-of-way, fenced with strong railings, the tall grass grows freely, interspersed with clumps of yellow Susans, purple rudbeckia, chunks of asters and small oaks, like a wall-to-wall meadow run wild. The walkway is crowded, as thick as 14th Street by the Whole Foods, grownup people, with toddlers in strollers, little kids running wild in surprise, (no dogs allowed) , gawkers on benches, observing the passing scene. The benches are works of art, built of 2x6 or 2x2 wood, freestanding or bolstered by cement buttresses, all different.
Walking north, admiring the view of the city – look, there is a misshapen building, or is that the IAC skyscraper by Frank Gehry? (yes, and his wife, Diane von Furstenburg, has a boutique down on 14th ). At 17th Street, where the rails cross 10th Avenue, there’s a Roman forum terraced with benches to view the traffic, seemingly open–ended at the bottom (a deception, an invisible glass wall protects the kids from dropping on top of the cars); you can view the golden Met insurance spire, and at 18th there is a view of a rooftop park, atop a restaurant aptly mamed The Park. Want to see the Statue of Liberty? At the charming little maple or plane tree grove , also near 18th, there is a sighting to the south, through the leaves . An ocean liner ? The huge Norvegian Spirit just happens to be passing, past the xx dock. A strange wire cage reaching up, high over the river? That’s the golf driving range of Chelsea Piers.
Let’s go back to the Gehry IAC building, which is sort of focal to the whole organized madness concept one senses here. Gehry’s 30 year breakthrough into the world of New York’s glass boxes, it houses Barry Diller’s InterActive Corporation, a media and internet empire. Try to define it? The IAC website flashes a page of cute corporate names, never stopping for a clos view. By adding the excel columns and multiplying by lines, you surmise there are 54 companies, more or less, named Ask.com, Citysearch, evite, bustedtees, CollegeHumor, Zwonky, vimeo, Kazulah, excite, pronto, showbug.com, Won; the mind boggles. It all adds to billions of dollars’ worth of flimflam, none ever splashed in the scandal pages of NYTimes business section. Are thet really more solid than banks? (Scratch that question– everything is.)
Anyway, this mirage fits in with the HighLine concept, created by the architectural firm of Diller Scofidio + Renfro (stet), led by James Corner Field Operations. DS+R gained fame with its 2006 ICA building (confuse not, that’s Institute of Contemporary Art) and its surrounds, in Boston’s Back Bay waterfront milieu, a prototype to NYC’s marvel of grass growing through concrete.
The walk ends soon after 20th street stairs, with a gate, beyond which you see a continuation, cement only, as of now, with a little nursery of plants for the Chelsea Grasslands (an unobtrusive sign someplace proclaims the meadows to be a gift of the Tiffany Foundation).
More experiences on the way back. There’s the jnteresting block of dark red brick mid-19th Century brownstones around a church at 20th Street; a glass wlll structure with white and blue windowshades that shies brightly when the sun comes out,contrasted with sinister warehouses visible down the path. All colors of New York, in a nutshell.ng 14th street steps we enter a covered passageway through a mysterious building in construction , then a long walk leading through a multi-story glass slab with floor to ceiling windows, which turns out to be Andre Balazs’ new Standard Hotel building, 337 rooms, a year old. What a view from there. Oh, yeah? I heard from a cynic, upon return, that exhibitionists rent rooms there and strip buck naked for show (the proud Balazs pastes some fig leaves on the pix and shows them on his web site, anything for a buck. Very a bad taste, man).
The path then continues to another little grove of trees, at the Gansewoort (12th Street) staircase. We return to fashionable 14th Street, no kidding, rich in boutiques, from Hugo Boss to Carlos Mole, with a DWR Design store, where kiddies jump around in Wilberforce Eames’ plastic chairs, still a great design after 50 years. We catch the M14 bus down on 9th Avenue, where an elegant midstreet mall breaks up traffic, just like at Madison Square Park. A day well spent.
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 7:46 AM 
