High Line Offers a Walk on the Wild Side

To achieve that, Friends of the High Line, the nonprofit group that saved the abandoned railway from demolition, is spending $90 million.

“People fell in love with the idea that nature had taken over this monumental industrial site,” said Joshua David, who, with Robert Hammond, founded Friends of the High Line, which now maintains and operates the park for the city. But to give the public that experience requires extensive work, including performing environmental remediation, shoring up the substructure and, in places, removing and then replacing the tracks.

In May, Friends of the High Line began offering tours of the third section, giving the public a preview even as work begins. Three days a week, tour groups step nimbly over track ballast and railroad ties, past discarded spikes and old steel plates. They take in the view of the Hudson River to the west and the active rail yard below, where commuter trains headed to and from Pennsylvania Station glide along 30 tracks. The tours, which are free, are already one of the summer’s hot tickets, and they are fully booked through early August.

The outings provide an opportunity to witness the open sky before the view is hemmed in by the new, $15 billion Hudson Yards district, which is being developed across 26 acres by the Related Companies and Oxford Properties Group. The project, which involves building a platform over the rail yard, will include over 13 million square feet of office, residential, hotel, retail and cultural space.

“People spend more time looking at the trains than the Hudson,” said Mr. Hammond, who joined Mr. David last week on a walk along the third section.

“It’s the flow of New York. That’s how people get in and out. It will disappear in a few years.”

Already under construction is an office tower for the luxury retailer Coach, which on Tuesday will announce a $5 million gift to Friends of the High Line. The group is in the middle of a $125 million capital campaign.

“It’s an expression of Coach’s commitment to the development of the new Hudson Yards and, of course, the High Line,” said Lew Frankfort, Coach’s chief executive officer. “We have been part of the landscape of the mid-West Side since our birth in 1941. We love the High Line. It has a spirit and energy that we’re proud to be associated with.”

Eventually, Coach’s building will straddle the new section, called High Line at the Railyards, which will evoke the ruin and rebirth that the founders found so compelling in the first place. There were self-seeding shrubs, wildflowers and grasses that had taken root amid the abandoned railway infrastructure. There was also a melancholy and quiet that contrasted with the bustle of the city.

A desire to recapture that feeling emerged during community meetings held in 2011 and 2012 to gather suggestions about the third section, which runs west from 30th Street and 10th Avenue to 12th Avenue and then continues north to 34th Street. Among individuals’ responses: “More wildness wherever possible”; “Preserve the visual drama of the rails”; “Please leave a very small section exactly the way it is now.”

The final leg will feature the High Line’s first attraction for children: a postindustrial jungle gym comprising a series of exposed beams covered in a soft play surface. The northern half will showcase the overgrown tracks; a simple path and railing will keep visitors away from hazards on the old tracks.

While the city paid for the construction costs of the first two sections, Friends of the High Line will cover most of the last section. The group also finances the park’s maintenance and its educational and cultural programming.

It recently commissioned the sculptor Carol Bove to create seven works for the third section — a mix of gleaming white curlicues, made of powder-coated steel, and pieces that are more industrial, fashioned from I-beams, and that seem to blend with the environment. But tour groups will also discover some ready-mades: one pile of twisted metal had all the hallmarks of a John Chamberlain sculpture.

Susan and Jim Goodfellow, who live in Tuxedo Park, N.Y., and have an apartment in Chelsea, recently took a tour. “It was a wonderful opportunity to see a decayed urban landscape,” Ms. Goodfellow said. “It will be great to have when friends from out of town visit. You really have to make a huge effort to explain what the High Line was.”

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