Reply With QuoteIt gets to feeling like you're in a human zoo display. Like Roddy McDowall in that Twilight Zone episode.
londonlawyer: I think that pic's off; The person in the foreground in the second rendering is lower, also.
I understand Loft, but why did they let his balcony be so close to an existing structure that would make it possible for someone to span it w/o significant difficulty? Abandoned or not, there are setback requirements for everything.
It gets to feeling like you're in a human zoo display. Like Roddy McDowall in that Twilight Zone episode.
londonlawyer: I think that pic's off; The person in the foreground in the second rendering is lower, also.
Solution, build a retaining wall (people retaining that is) along the side where this happens.
July 28, 2011, 5:02 pm Below the High Line, Spiraling Roller SkatersBy SYDNEY EMBERAndrea Morales/The New York TimesRoller skaters at the High Line Rink on Thursday, the day it opened.
The man was an island of bliss in the midst of chaos. He twirled, spinning on roller skates under the High Line, balanced and composed. Around him, people were falling. Legs splayed. Wrists buckled. An ankle was sprained.
This was one of the scenes at the High Line Rink, which opened Thursday beneath the High Line, at 10th Avenue and 30th Street, in a former parking lot.
The retro rink, which will be remain till Sept. 26, was the brainchild of Friends of the High Line, which maintains the park and provides most of its budget, and was created in partnership with Uniqlo, a clothing brand.
“I think this is amazing,” said Kristen Campbell, who skates with the Gotham Girls Roller Derby team and was there to test the rink before it officially opened. “People can start working on their skater legs.”
Some skaters, like Boots Burrow, 9, were roller skating for the first time. “I really enjoy skating on ice skates,” she said. “So I think I might like this.” Steve Love, a self-described professional skater, said he was there to assess the rink’s surface: it felt smooth, he said, like wood.
The rink turned briefly into a trauma center when a girl sprained her ankle minutes after the rink opened. Tears streamed down her face as a paramedic wheeled in a stretcher while another wrapped the girl’s foot in ice.
The 8,000-square-foot rink is enclosed by orange and white construction barriers, reinforcing its temporary nature. The beer and wine bar next to the rink was not open yet, but there will be policies in place to prevent overzealous patrons from entering the rink, said Kate Lindquist, a spokeswoman for Friends of the High Line. Though no one had determined specific protocol yet, she said drinks would not be allowed in the rink.
Above the rink, on the High Line, that linear park built on old elevated train tracks, a line of visitors ogled the skaters, and people crowded around the rink sipping drinks. “We wanted to animate the site,” said Joshua David, a co-founder of Friends of the High Line. “It’s a spectacle.”
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/20...room&seid=auto
"Overzealous patrons"
*snicker*
A terrific video (at the link click HD and Full Screen):
The High Line (Phase 2)
A video presented by ARCHITECT magazine.
^ I saw the link to that on Twitter and forgot to check it out and post it here. Thanks, Lofter.
If only everything else in NYC could be as well conceived and designed as the High Line <sigh>.
At The High Line, A Different Kind Of Book Club Begins
by Paul Needham
NEW YORK -- First there was High Line exhibitionism. Then came High Line boot camp. And now a book club has met on the High Line.
It wasn't a normal book club, but very little is normal on the High Line, this city's elevated railroad-turned-park. Many in the group of about 50 strangers who gathered Thursday night for the first installment of the so-called Architecture and Design Book Club had heard about the event on Twitter, and the location itself was chosen to match the reading: A few chapters of William Whyte's The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces.
Alexandra Lange, the journalist and architectural historian, led the discussion; before she spoke, though, Molly Heintz, one of the organizers from Superscript, introduced the event.
"We don't want this to be an average book club," she said. "We want it to be a public one." All through the roughly hour-long discussion, people walking up and down the High Line joined the group -- some for a few seconds, some for much longer.
The talk itself was wide-ranging, and began with Lange connecting the reading to the location. She raised the idea that the High Line itself is what Whyte called a triangulator: It has the power to bring two strangers together by putting a third object in front of them.
Someone near the outside of the group called the High Line a "plaza on steroids," but another man disagreed, calling it a "street on steroids." At least we can all agree it's on steroids.
And there was some discussion of how the High Line breaks a few of Whyte's rules. The seating on the High Line, designed by Diller Scofidio & Renfro, is mostly immobile, but Whyte called for portable chairs so that groups could assemble or disassemble, and so the sun could be found or avoided.
Heintz said the next installment of the Architecture and Design Book Club may be held at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts during Fashion Week. The topic of the reading will be -- what else? -- spectacle.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/19/at-the-high-line-a-different-kind-book-club_n_931266.html?ir=New York
Good idea. I'm sure some of WNY's architectural students wouldn't mind meeting there. Plus, if they meet in colder weather, it will cut down on some of the "tourists".
I just think it's great that the High Line has proved to be functionally multi-purpose and in such good ways, and not just for looking at/sightseeing.
High Line Tour Offers Glimpse of Closed Section
By Sonja Sharp
HELL'S KITCHEN — Adam Bildersee and his girlfriend Dylah Werbner are far from the first New Yorkers to fall in love on the High Line, but Sunday they were among the first to fall in love with it’s northern frontier.The couple, who had their second date at the popular West Side park, were among the intrepid visitors who braved tangles of bramble, rusted rails and pitted track beds on the High Line’s so-called Section Three, normally closed to the public but accessible to small groups this weekend as a part of Open House New York.
“We both really love the park,” said Bildersee, 24, who lives blocks away in Midtown West. Between them, the pair estimated they’d visited the park’s first two sections nearly two dozen times.
Unlike its manicured neighbor to the south, Section Three, which stretches north from West 33rd Street, has been all but abandoned since the last train rumbled north here in 1980 The Friends of the High Line hope it too will one day be open to the public.
Still, Sunday’s visitors said they appreciated the ribbon of tracks overlooking an LIRR train yard and the West Side Highway, winding south from 34th Street, as a swath of untrammeled urban landscape.
“It would be nice if they kept it in this natural state, maybe just put in a path here but kept it in a state of preserved decay,” said J.R. Lettenberger, 30, who was visiting from Greenpoint.
“What they have further down is nice, but they could make this like an urban Appalachian Trail.”
Werbner said she preferred the secluded Section Three to the bustling High Line proper.
“It’s more special right here because it’s more empty,” the Morningside Heights resident said. “This is just so nice and open—look at the park, how crowded it is.”
http://www.dnainfo.com/20111017/chel...#ixzz1b7ztOGBM
Three Cheers for Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenburg!
Good news for the final section around the West Side Rail Yards ...
Record $20 Million Gift to Help Finish the High Line Park
Benjamin Norman for The New York TimesNEW YORK TIMES
A view of the final leg of the High Line, which will run north to 34th Street on the West Side.
The Diller-von Furstenberg Family Foundation made the gift.
By LISA W. FODERARO
Published: October 26, 2011
Many visitors to the High Line, the popular park that wends above street level on the West Side of Manhattan, stop at its northern terminus and peer wistfully through a chain-link fence at the as-yet unreclaimed half-mile segment to the north. Until this week, the nonprofit conservancy that operates the High Line still needed to raise $85 million to finish the park and maintain it.
On Wednesday night, the conservancy took a major step toward that goal when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced a $20 million gift to the High Line from the Diller-von Furstenberg Family Foundation.
The gift, which will help build up the park’s endowment and pay for the design of the last section, is the single largest donation ever made to a New York City park, according to city officials.
It follows two previous donations totaling $15 million to the High Line from Barry Diller, chairman of IAC and Expedia, and his wife, the designer Diane von Furstenberg.
“It’s not surprising that Barry and Diane — visionaries that they are — got in early on the High Line project,” Mr. Bloomberg said in a statement. “But even better, they are seeing it through. Their generosity is leading the way for the High Line to become a New York icon that will be enjoyed for generations to come.”
The High Line is an unusual public-private partnership. The city paid most of the construction costs of the first two sections (the second opened earlier this year), which together run from Gansevoort to 30th Streets.
But Friends of the High Line, the conservancy that rallied to save the railway from demolition and raised money for its transformation into a park, assumed full responsibility for the cost of the operations from the start.
With three million annual visitors, 10 times what the founders of the conservancy initially envisioned, wear and tear, as well as educational programming, is a constant challenge for the 60-member staff.
“If you ask Josh or me what keeps us up at night, it’s not next year or whether we complete it — we know it will get done,” said Robert Hammond, co-founder of Friends of the High Line along with Joshua David. “It’s the maintenance, and this gives us security. Having an endowment gives us another revenue stream to fall back on in hard times.”
Annual operating costs for the park come to $3 million.
But perhaps just as important is the gift’s ability to propel Friends of the High Line toward the finish line: the railway’s endpoint at 34th Street. Now the curvaceous teak benches and ornamental grasses that make up the park’s northern landscaping stop abruptly at that chain-link fence.
On the other side is a jumble of weeds, rocks and old ladders. The future section, which hugs the West Side Railyards, runs west to 12th Avenue and then continues north to 34th Street.
That segment is owned by CSX Transportation, which is now in negotiations with city officials, as well as the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and other interested parties, on an agreement that would allow for public access. In 2005, CSX donated the portion of the High Line south of 30th Street to the city.
Adrian Benepe, commissioner of the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation, said the talks dealt with a “very complicated site.” But he added that “everyone wants for the city to eventually” obtain the site for the High Line park.
Mr. David and Mr. Hammond estimate that the final half-mile stretch will cost up to $75 million to build, about the same as each of the first two half-mile sections. Given the constraints on the city’s budget, private sources will have to cover the initial capital expense, they said. Before the new gift, Friends of the High Line had raised about $65 million toward its $150 million fund-raising goal.
In a statement, Mr. Diller took the long view. “In a hundred years, people will be amazed that this park was ever built, and during all that time it will have given pleasure to such great numbers of people,” he said. “I’m glad that our family is able to pay a small role in making the High Line a reality.”
In a city of deep-pocketed philanthropists, the donation from Mr. Diller and Ms. von Furstenberg turned heads, not least because it went to a park rather than a cultural or educational institution. Previously, the largest private gift to a park was $17 million from the philanthropist Richard Gilder in 1993 to Central Park.
Friends of the High Line hopes that the $20 million donation will inspire additional giving.
That happened once before. After the Museum of Modern Art mounted a small exhibition of designs for the park in 2005, the Diller-von Furstenberg Family Foundation made its first gift of $5 million, generating interest in the project. Then came a gift of $10 million from the foundation in 2009. Earlier this year, Tiffany and Company Foundation gave a $5 million challenge grant.
The return on those investments has been substantial; the first two sections of the High Line have generated more than $2 billion in planned or new development, city officials said. The park has also become a major tourist attraction, drawing a quarter of its visitors from outside the United States.
Gazing at the unfinished segment, Martin Oeggerli, 37, a photographer visiting from Switzerland, said he would like the park to keep going. “It would go straight to the Hudson and give you a great view,” he said.
Last week, when Mr. Diller told Friends of the High Line of the gift over the phone, the conference room erupted. “A large number of people on our staff burst into tears,” Mr. Hammond said.
Posting Permissions
Bookmarks