The High Line was built to carry freight trains above Manhattan’s West Side, and was responsible for moving meat, dairy, produce and other goods without sending trains through crowded city streets. Freight service began on the elevated structure in 1934 and ended in 1980, and for years afterward, the railway sat unused, with plants spreading across its tracks. Today, the structure has been converted into a 1.45-mile elevated public park.
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Why the trains were lifted above the streets
Freight trains travelled at street level before the elevated structure was built, where they shared roads with pedestrians, automobiles and other traffic. The elevated line changed that arrangement, and trains could now move above the streets and reach factories, warehouses and loading docks along the route. New York City later described the railway as infrastructure built in the 1930s to remove dangerous freight traffic from Manhattan’s streets while continuing to deliver milk, meat, produce and manufactured goods to businesses on the West Side.
Trains had stopped using the High Line altogether by 1980, and the last train carried three carloads of frozen turkeys, according to Friends of the High Line’s historical material . The structure became an abandoned piece of elevated infrastructure with tracks, ballast and vegetation left above the streets.
The railway nearly disappeared
The unused structure was eventually threatened with demolition, and in 1999, neighborhood residents Joshua David and Robert Hammond founded Friends of the High Line to campaign for its preservation and reuse as public open space. An established argument faced by the organisation was that the railway was no longer carrying freight and occupied valuable land in one of Manhattan’s most heavily developed areas. Preservation campaigners proposed turning it into a public space instead of treating the structure as obsolete infrastructure.
The city and Friends of the High Line eventually pursued the park idea, and the first section opened to the public in June 2009, which ran from Gansevoort Street to West 20th Street. New York City said the first section drew more than two million visitors during its first year.
The tracks became part of the park
Landscape architects James Corner Field Operations, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and planting designer Piet Oudolf incorporated portions of the old tracks into the park and designed planting areas around them. The second section, from West 20th to West 30th Streets, opened in 2011, and the Rail Yards section, which extended from north to West 34th Street, opened in 2014. The final section of the historic structure, known as the Spur, opened in 2019, which completed the main High Line park.
The abandoned railway had therefore become a public landscape in stages rather than through a single redevelopment project, and more than one-third of the original rail tracks remain incorporated into the park’s design, alongside hundreds of species of plants.
Friends of the High Line reported more than four million visitors annually by the early 2010s, while its more recent materials put annual visitation at about eight million. The elevated freight railway that once served Manhattan’s industrial economy is now a public park visited by millions each year.
