It was a flowing, glowing kind of day and Josh and I had just waved goodbye to friends with whom we’d had breakfast when he suggested we walk the High Line. I’d heard a buzz about the High Line and I still had an image of a trapezy kind of experience in my mind. Still, I was up for a walk and an adventure and so we set off in the direction of a bridge.
Climbing the steep stairs we were greeted with a ROOOAAARR and a fierce lion girl stood with her girly claws pointed at us, her golden mane swinging. Then she dissolved in a fit of giggles at our scaredy cat response and she ran away skipping with her sister in tow, their mother smiling nearby.
And that was all it took for me to feel transported to CS Lewis’s world of Narnia, from my memories of reading The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe as a girl. It was the equivalent of stepping into the wardrobe and finding ourselves in an enchanted world. This one straight from the pages of ee Cummings poetry, ‘I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes.’
Along the main strip were plants and flowerbeds while the railway tracks were greened and given new life. In every direction were stunning views of the Hudson River, the streets below teeming with life, all around was fabulous architecture of old buildings and new, and the skyline of New York always, tantalizingly ahead of us as we walked.
The High Line was built in the 1930s as part of a massive public private infrastructure project in New York called the West Side Improvement. It was designed for freight trains to operate from 30 feet in the air in order to remove them from the streets of Manhattan and these trains operated until 1980. When the structure was under threat of demolition, the Friends of the High Line formed as a not-for-profit group to advocate to preserve the structure as an elevated public park. Their efforts paid off and in 2002 the City of New York engaged architects to create the public landscape working in collaboration with a diverse community of High Line supporters. After a lengthy planning and consultation process, work on the High Line Park commenced in 2006 and the first section of the park opened in 2009 with the second section opening this year.
Friends of the High Line appointed a Curator and Director of High Line Art Program to lead High Line Art, a program that introduces temporary public art commissions, collaborations and events in and around the High Line to the some 2 million people who annually walk the High Line. The curator, Cecilia Alemani ,calls the High Line, ’the new museum mile…connecting two neighbourhoods that make up the cultural hub of New York city (West Chelsea and the Meatpacking District) with more than 400 galleries and cultural organizations that populate the streets below the park’.
“I am so glad to be in a community of such happy and content people”, I heard a woman say to her husband as they walked behind us. I felt the same way. Josh, who is sensitive to some crowds, visibly relaxed and delighted in the vistas, the architecture, the flowers and plants coming to life literally between the cracks of railway tracks. Everyone seemed in a good mood as we swung down the walk. At one point, Josh and I stepped off to the side to clamber onto one of the wooden beach recliners in order to sun ourselves. Mmm, bliss!
Further along Friends of the High Line were selling maps, t-shirts, bags and memberships and doing a roaring trade. Artists were selling their own creations while ice-cream sandwiches were proving a real hit along with coffee carts alongside wonderful sculptures that seemed to have sprung to life through Aslan’s breath.
It was easy to let everything drop away in this environment – I let all the new donor proposals and celebrations of donor funding and soap opera showcasing and Board member conversations and plans for new programs and facilitation of girls savings all fade away for the remainder of the day and felt free to just be.
We walked down from the High Line and found ourselves this time in a different exit point to where we’d entered – this time in the Meatpacking District so very close to my apartment. It was an easy walk through another gorgeous area of the city where dozens of people seemed to have had the same idea of a fish and chip lunch at an outside café washed down with a wine or glass of beer. It felt like we were on holidays as we walked through the chilled out crowd.
Later I caught up with my lovely writer friend, Lily, and we talked for hours over steamy cups of tea in SoHo. I returned home to a meal of fresh fish and vegetables that Josh cooked from produce we’d bought that morning from the baby farmers’ market in the park across from my apartment. Josh played me a tune on the banjo he’d bought me while I danced…in between we drank from an Aladdin’s Lamp yellow teapot and, in that moment, I felt that some deep magic had infused the day.
Jane Sloane