How the High Line changed NYC: A 'poster child' for gentrification and adaptive reuse

This year marks 15 years since the High Line's opening in June 2009. The trail occupies an elevated rail line that was an industrial symbol of Manhattan's West Side until 1980, when the last train ran on the tracks.

Mother Nature would slowly overtake the unused rails over the next two decades. But when the city planned to tear down the elevated rail line, neighbors created their own plan to transform them into a public space.

A public-private partnership was created to establish the gardens that millions of people now visit each year. Fans of the High Line have called it an urban blueprint for how to revive a neighborhood, while critics say it caused gentrification.

WNYC’s Alison Stewart spoke with historian Annik LaFarge, author of "On the High Line: The Definitive Guide," on a recent episode of “All of It.” An edited version of their conversation is below.

Annik LaFarge: The thing about the High Line is that it stands for that thing that we all know in New York, which is change – change is always happening all the time.

The idea of change was baked into the High Line from the very beginning because the philosophy of the garden design was all about constant change throughout the seasons, which is beautiful and interesting at the height of the summer season, and also in the depths of winter.

LaFarge: One of the fascinating things I learned when researching this book is that there was a 13th Avenue in New York City. It was an industrial district that had been created after the city allowed investors to fill in water lots with landfill in the 1930s. There were all kinds of industry: oil depots, stone yards, ice depots, warehouses, lumberyards, factories, all kinds of things.

The High Line itself was built to solve the age old problem in New York City of traffic. A lot of that came from all of this industry, but a lot of it came from the trains that were running along the tracks since the early 1850s from the streets.

LaFarge: In the 1850s, the city authorized the laying of track for 13 miles up the Hudson River to Spuyten Duyvil. Very quickly, the city realized that they had made a big mistake by having all these locomotives – because so many people were getting killed and injured. Tenth Avenue became known as Death Avenue.

The city came up with this really interesting ordinance, which provided for men on horseback. There were always men to precede a train as it went up and down the avenues. They were legally required to wave a red flag by day and a red lantern by night to warn pedestrians of oncoming trains.

The High Line itself, the park, the elevated rail line, was conceived in the 1830s to take the trains off the streets, and make the streets safer. Though the idea of locomotives in our city streets is really hard to fathom.

LaFarge: It shut down in 1980 because all new kinds of transportation were now filling the needs of both industry and individuals. You had airplanes and container shipping, and the railroads started to wane in their impact.

LaFarge: It was the ancient art of real estate and money-making in New York, because a lot of people owned property underneath the High Line. If they could have the right to build up once the viaduct had been torn down, they would have made a lot of money.

Robert Hammond and Joshua David, who were the founders of Friends of the High Line, met at a community board meeting in 1999. They were talking about the demolition of the High Line and the controversy over it.

They went up there and were gobsmacked by what they saw and just figured, "You know what? We can do something better, cooler, and more interesting." That's what they did.

LaFarge: The High Line is owned by the City of New York, and it operates under the jurisdiction of the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, but it was was donated to the city by CSX, which was the successor to the original railroad.

The “public-private” partnership piece of it is what was a relatively new innovation in the planning of the park and meant that Friends of the High Line, as a group, could be the steward of the park.

They generate something like 90% of all the funds required to run it, but they get a lot of donations from private people and from organizations. It is a collaborative project in that respect.

Sasha: I’ve been working in Chelsea for a number of years now, but I've also been a wheelchair user since 2009. I love The High Line. I love getting up there and getting to wheel along it. It's nice and flat. There's just enough space, even when it's pretty busy. The accessibility of The High Line is a big problem. Specifically, the elevators are often out of service. I'm not talking about for a day – I'm talking about for weeks or months or even a year.

The one on 16th Street has been out of service, and it's deeply frustrating. As you know, for wheelchairs, it means you can't get up there. It's really unsafe for a lot of people who are forced to take the stairs with strollers, luggage, what have you.

Who do we talk to? Who can we encourage to get this right? Because it's not rocket science and it would let a lot more people enjoy it.

LaFarge: I think the elevators have been a problem since the very beginning, and I know that they're extremely committed to getting them back in service. There is one now in service at 14th Street, but it is enormously frustrating and enormously important. I think the best thing that your caller can do is to reach out to Friends of the High Line online. They are an enormously responsive organization, and they'll tell you what the problem is and what their plans are to fix it. It shouldn't be this way.

LaFarge: Right. That would be the Beltline. I think this is one of the most important things that Friends of the High Line did, including after they realized very quickly that the impact of gentrification had become so pronounced. They wanted to find a way to impart all the lessons that they learned – not only about bringing the local community into the decision-making process, but also nuts and bolts on dealing with the politics in local cities, how to do fundraising, stuff like that.

They started the High Line Network. What they do is they advise people all over the world who want to do these adaptive reuse projects and advise them.

It's a really important part of the messaging of this park, which became the poster child for gentrification, but it also became the poster child for doing adaptive reuse in a really innovative and quite spectacular way.

What they're trying to do is to help people in different communities to do the same thing, but to do it better and to do it with a more, through a lens of social equity and community involvement to avoid the impacts of gentrification.

LaFarge: A lot of it causes me a little bit of concern, to be honest. I lived there for 15 years. We let go of our loft last year. I'm living now in Hudson, New York, but I'm in the city every week. I'm on the High Line every week.

It changed the neighborhood in the sense that, for me personally, it became a less interesting neighborhood, because it started to feel, frankly, whiter and richer. The construction was really overwhelming. We were bombarded all the time by noise, dust, trucks, illegal parking, and all the stuff that we associate with construction.

What I think is hopeful – not to be a Pollyanna – but to try to think about the upside of this is that these projects do allow a lot of economic growth, and a lot of people did get jobs in the neighborhood.

To me, one of the saddest things was the closing of the Church of the Guardian Angel School. This was a school that really served a lower-middle-class demographic. I think the tuition was something like $6,000 a year. Then you have the Avenues School a few blocks north, where the tuition is something like $40,000, $50,000, $60,000 a year.

The Guardian Angel Church School closed permanently, from what I understand. That was a place where local people could afford to send their kids and get a decent education. To me, that's really, really upsetting.

LaFarge: In the first edition of my book, I had a thing about how West Chelsea was one of the best places in New York to park your car, fill it up with gas, repair it, wash it. And all those places are gone now.