High Times

The High Line

Imagine the ideal city. Modernism did, again and again. From Surrealist landscapes to the architecture that shaped real twentieth-century cities, Modernism kept reaching higher, toward something purer and less confining. And, again and again, it failed to reach fruition, blocked out the sky, found only nightmares, or fell into disuse and disrepair.

Now the High Line offers a contrasting ideal, an elevated park for Manhattan's far west side. On the very ruins of the industrial city, a railway bed crumbling into rusted metal and weeds, it promises an alternative. In plans on view at the Museum of Modern Art, it creates a path right through the heart of the Chelsea gallery scene. It also navigates between street life and the Hudson River, encompassing a city's past economic activity and present leisure. But does it mark a break with Modernism's dystopias or yet another prescription for failure? Another review, added in 2006, considers one possible tenant for the foot of the High Line—the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Modernism's Babel

The nineteenth century all but belonged to the landscape. From Romanticism to Impressionism, it described people on the edge between city and country. John Constable, Hudson River School artists such as Asher Durand and F. E. Church, or Claude Monet—all saw in that contested border a place to test the active imagination. As an exhibition of George Inness put it, art discovered the "visionary landscape."

With its singular combination of idealism, irony, and commitment to the brute reality of living from day to day, Modernism could well stand for the city. No wonder textbooks so often identify it with Paris and New York. And yet it, too, had its visions.

Take two framing moments. In 1917, Le Corbusier issued Vers une Architecture. When looking toward an architecture, toward that still-unrealized whole, who even needs the word new? Here and in his many projects, he imagined "a fresh start," in tall residences as powerful, affordable, and quick to assemble as Ford's assembly-line automobiles. With towers and gardens set off from the street, they would rescue life from the hellish darkness of cities like Charles Dickens's London. The date of the Russian revolution ushered in other artistic dreams, of course, as well.

The ideal city has served ever since for target practice—of, in the hands of Gordon Matta-Clark, physical destruction. Michel Foucault and others have described Modernism as a frightening extension of the all-seeing eye. Preservationists find the ideal city's legacy in crime-ridden, fortress-like housing projects, now only slowly giving way to bulldozers, decontrol, and reform. Architects still fear its explosive mixture of populism and an urban planner's total control. The mix lingers on in the very name of perhaps its worst and final gesture, the Robin Hood Gardens in East London. Peter and Alison Smith created that brutalist project in 1972.

Barely a year before, Michael Heizer began to imagine another City. Its dirt and thirty-ton concrete slabs aim to remake the Nevada desert in perfect alignments. Although Heizer completed the first "complex" by 1980, the work remains incomplete and, by the artist's strict intentions, inaccessible. From 1917 to 1972, each vision rises above the land and its inhabitants, barring its future transformation. The move to Joshua Tree, California, of Andrea Zittel and her Wagon Stations, may update his project for the year 2000.

Modernism may have been looking up, to escape a darker past, but its every elevation turned out to cast a shadow. Think of the Sixth Avenue elevated train commemorated by John Sloan, destroyed long ago to allow Greenwich Village to live. Like that early subway system, too—or as in a mock underground station by Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset—elevated cities have achieved their impact only in incompletion, abandonment, or destruction. They recall a still earlier parable of the ideal city, the Tower of Babel. Perhaps the Lord was looking forward to Postmodernism, when in response he "confused the language of all the earth."

Ground Zero plus one

Well before 1972, architects, critics, and neighborhoods were taking notice. As a Village resident herself argued, urban planning had to attend to patterns of life. Jane Jacobs proposed the urban grid—incorporating living, shopping, and recreation—as a source of community and even loveliness. She began planning The Death and Life of Cities in 1958. Outrage against another elevated threat to the Village, Robert Moses's 1961 plans for a highway, spurred the new urbanism in earnest.

Ever since, public and private efforts have contributed to the redevelopment and greening of central cities and fringe neighborhoods, and both efforts are needed. Can they extend to lower Manhattan? The High Line promises just such a partnership. It may ultimately convert a freight-line viaduct, which once connected factories and warehouses on the far west side of Manhattan, into parkland. Starting at the line's southern terminus, in the meatpacking district west of Greenwich Village, its advocates propose gradual additions over several years, leading to varied environments and ecosystems up to 34th Street.

Besides a model and sketches, the Modern's exhibition includes some of the proposal's antecedents, in architectural plans from the museum's rich permanent collection. It also has Joel Sternfeld's photographs of the line today, with wild vegetation that remains inaccessible to those below. Sternfeld's passion did much to move the project from a wild idea through neighborhood controversy and on to museum backing.

The line's advocates see it as a recovery of such vistas, along with layers of urban history. They imagine the High Line as a blow against the usual models of development. Rather than ripping out the past and putting high rises in its place, they propose to take as givens the freight line's curve, its location, its dark iron, and its overgrowth of life.

They imagine a final rusted-iron nail in the coffin of the ideal city. That ideal can make the familiar name for the World Trade Center site sound eerily appropriate: in effect, they refuse to build from Ground Zero. The first stage incorporates designs by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, a firm praised by the Whitney for its "aberrant architecture," in conjunction with Field Operations.

However, what if they actually further Le Corbusier's top-down approach? What if they, too, offer a scheme detached from existing patterns of human activity—gussied up with a dollop of Minimalist entropy, a politically correct bow to context, and the American dream of unspoiled nature?

From grid to parkland

I cannot review a work that I may never see, at least for years. Like most New Yorkers, I always expect the worst and hope for the best, especially for surprises. Yet I want to spoil the party long enough to ask questions. The High Line promises to address its multiple contexts as Modernism never would—including the city grid, the development of an arts district, parkland, and notions of urban history. I want to ask how well it is doing.

Obviously the project cannot respect the grid, because the original freight line does not. It rises above in mid-block, passes through buildings, and does not follow a straight line. While it does not destroy street traffic, it does not exactly encourage normal pedestrian patterns either. In fact, it effectively detaches Eleventh Avenue from the rest of town. It blocks views of the Hudson from the east, and it hides the skyline as one walks away from the river.

It casts a heavy shadow across the street, both literally and in its own form. I doubt that anyone has taken real pleasure in the freight line's underside, and only one thing in the plans calls for that to change: of all things, a modernist glass box will surround the entrance stairwell. Imagine Central Park placed behind a one-story rusted iron and glass wall. I suspect that its neighbors would not have the same affection for it.

Not surprisingly, business and real-estate interests long wanted the line simply torn down. Who even wished to guarantee its structural integrity anyway? One can therefore phrase the issue as commercial development versus the existing structures and recreational use. However, one can equally well describe it as gentrification. It marks one more stage in the influx of a new, wealthier gallery clientele at the expense of a mixed-use community—one that, until recently, few even dared called Chelsea. Indeed, it could well encourage more luxury apartments, for people willing to pay to overlook the tracks.

Again it may replicate the modernist impulse toward top-down development and an idealized, interest-free view of the arts. Somehow, contextual architecture has temporarily forgotten that a huge gallery district and museum cosponsors have commercial and institutional commitments of their own. Artists do rebel against the system, of course. Patrick Mimran continues to mount pretend billboards along the line, with gnomic messages about the purity of art. I have my doubts, however, that his local intrusion can survive the High Line's higher aims.

As for parkland, the High Line proposes itself solely as an end, a destination, like a botanical garden but for wildflowers. The scale model, with its bristles of pretend tawny wild species, reminds me of the world's largest hairbrush. Sternfeld's photographs, in turn, remind me of the New Jersey Meadowlands imported into Manhattan. At last New Yorkers, as Robert Smithson advised, are "learning from New Jersey."

A context for the past

The line promises the greening of the west side, but it lies at odds with how and why people use parks. They wander through them, as more attractive than alternative routes. They use them for their own purposes, as for strolling or jogging. Only when tourists and artists intervene, as with The Gates, or when a parks has earned its critical mass in other ways do they take it as a destination for sightseeing.

Parks encourage use in many ways. They seek integration into street patterns, as with Madison Square. They achieve scope and versatility, as with Central Park. They formally incorporate dog runs, athletic fields, and playgrounds. While Hudson River Park amounts in places to little more than a bicycle path, it is succeeding in each of these ways. It connects streets to the river and remains open to additional, unanticipated purposes over time—already everything from a trapeze school and batting cage to schlock photography out on the piers.

One can hardly Rollerblade through the High Line, and I cannot imagine anyone bothering with an elevator to wheel a baby's stroller along it. Rather, it replicates the patterns of design and use for the false entrance to the remodeled Brooklyn Museum, another raised platform. One walks up, looks about to one's chagrin, and walks right back down. The High Line even diverts funds and people that could further Hudson River Park so nearby. Right now, it becomes unrelieved pavement and commerce as it veers north of Greenwich Village, where private interests in leisure space run out.

In all these ways, the High Line creates one more raised garden city after all, only in the image of an abandoned lot. It has much in common with other efforts to preserve ruin, in proposals to leave the other Ground Zero as a memorial. Each comes packaged as an unchanging destination. Each proposes a fixed relationship to the past, an act of preservation that removes the present from the dimension of time. And each pays homage to something that has died.

No wonder the High Line feels so at home among earlier architectural visions at the Modern and elsewhere, what one show has called its "Burgeoning Geometries." Then again, the Modern just happens to have knocked down a few old buildings in the last few years itself. It also just happens to have dug deeper and risen higher, without solving its relationship to the last century.

The High Line repeats the failings of the past in the interest of preservation, because it pictures the past as static rather than itself a product of changing contexts. It idealizes ruin over other alterations, wildflowers over grass and other species, because it approaches even the city with an abstraction of the natural. A truly new architecture can recover the city natural and historical contexts for the present, but only by first learning a context for the past as well.

Beyond utopia

Modernism never did live up to its utopias, which may explain why even it keeps outlasting its critics. Even a leading pragmatist among philosophers, Richard Rorty, invokes utopia to defend feminism. The dates of my architectural revolutions, 1917 and 1972, resonate with the Postmodern paradox: Modernism still looks like both an end and a beginning, a legacy that artists so love to hate that its influence drives their work.

Minimalism and earthworks exceed a tidy narrative of utopia and failure. They mark an end and a beginning after Modernism, a moment encompassing the geometry of the past and the theater of the present. Heizer's ego and scale make Le Corbusier's vision of a common good look downright modest and altruistic. Yet he abandons any pretence of transforming humanity. He has even derided other landscape artists of his generation, such as Smithson and Walter de Maria, as New Yorkers who thought that they could descend upon the American west and shape the planet.

Nor did Le Corbusier lead so obviously to desecration. Donald Trump did not need him to show how to reach for tawdry materials and a show of luxury, especially not when postmodernists were talking of "learning from Miami Beach." Moreover, if New York housing projects still enshrine danger and despair, similar architecture gave the middle-class residents of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village safe places to congregate and to live. Seniors today are forced to scramble for affordable housing, with the expiration of twenty years of Mitchell-Lama rent protection in too many such high rises.

Conversely, lovely brownstones, sidewalk access, and an integration of the residential and commercial did not keep Harlem and much of Brooklyn from danger. The weeds, cracks, and crack in the pavement testify to a difficult history, and it will take more than a memorial to give that history a context for understanding and change now.

When Jacobs invests so much hope in architecture, she may be perpetuating the same myth as Le Corbusier after all. Apparently, such minor factors as racism and class do matter. Her cherished West Village suffers from among the city's highest rents, plus the incursion of Richard Meier's waterfront high rises and the downward spread of Chelsea cool. The artists and dealers have long left, and each Saturday night the bridge-and-tunnel crowd descends. Jacobs herself has moved to Toronto.

Can another raised garden do better for a district with already so many galleries, restaurants, and luxury apartments? Or will it wall them off from the middle-class London Terrace to the west? And will it wall off London Terrace from the Hudson? Will they discover the wild beauty in Sternfeld's patches of nature or look the other way?

The two-dimensional tower

Ironically, Modernism's pattern of overreaching and collapse ties its utopias to the vital turmoil of the city. Like the Tower of Babel, as painted by Pieter Bruegel, on closer inspection it has exactly the variety of activity that Jacobs sought to bring to earth. Its successors, like the dizzying but brusque forms of Zaha Hadid, have the double burden of criticizing its failures and matching that turmoil.

Abandoning the tower will work only if it does not reinstate another myth, common even in digital art—America's identification with the landscape. To this day, one cannot detach that identification from the promise of perpetual expansion and dominion. In practice, the equation of sanity and security with the horizontal plane has helped to further suburban sprawl and a more savage human "footprint" on the planet. No wonder Modernism and urban realism, both the ideal and the real city, have so often given way.

To that two-dimensional Tower of Babel, exurbia also adds the vertical city's isolation, in its gated communities. In its tight space, placing visitors face to face, the High Line, too, may suggest a community in which everyone is watching. I cannot help remembering that in their past work Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio have often used anonymous materials, cameras, confined spaces, and images of global travel. In this way they have invoked a post-urban space in which no one is at home and everyone is a spy.

The High Line may well bring one more horizontal tower, one more dream of the garden, and one more memorial to isolation. Small lots for community gardens in the East Village long did the same, holding out pockets of needed hope and pleasure, without making a dent in a larger community scarred by greater forces. They pleased mostly those who tended them. And, eventually, East Village art moved elsewhere, and the gentrifiers moved in.

A recent swing the other way, including a hideous condo now on Astor Place, does not do much for the East Village either. Neither the one-dimensional nor the two-dimensional tower are enough. A real context in past and present has to recover a third dimension. It has to find a human, social, esthetic, and economic context that goes beyond the given—whether the given of nature of the given of the wrought-iron facts on the ground.

I do not know whether to favor forward expansion or the utter destruction of the High Line. I do not know whether a different architecture would better recover the west side. I do not know for sure whether the Whitney means it, when it plans to open a branch at the foot of the High Line designed by Renzo Piano. I do, however, suspect that no one is asking the right questions.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Plans for the High Line, by Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro with photographs by Joel Sternfeld, ran through October 31, 2005, at the Museum of Modern Art. Gossip about the Whitney's plans surfaced in late October 2006.