High Line: Corporate plaza or avenue in the sky?

Volume 1, Number 33 | The Weekly Newspaper of Chelsea | May 4 - 10, 2007

Talking Point

By Ed Hamilton

When Joshua David of Friends of the High Line read my piece in BlogChelsea.com (Jan. 2, 2007) in which I called the High Line project a big corporate giveaway, he invited me pay him a visit in order to discuss the project. So on Thursday, April 26, I went to visit him at his well-appointed office on West 14th Street. Of medium height, with close cropped hair and glasses, David is charming and competent, and I believe he is well intentioned and cares, in his own way, for the Chelsea community. Unfortunately, I can’t get past the feeling that he seems to have become an apologist for the corporate interests that are now in charge of the High Line project. Though David wanted to get me on his side, and though I was certainly willing to be persuaded (despite my numerous misgivings, I’m still eager for the park to be completed), I felt he was more concerned with giving his slide show presentation than with answering my questions. (For instance, he didn’t want to answer questions as to how many condo buildings were planned for the area around the High Line—Danielle Wolffe, in “Real Estate Weekly,” reported 31 as of November 15, 2006—or as to how many of these would be directly adjacent to the High Line, questions to which I feel he should have been able to supply answers, or at least give estimates. He is supposed to be the expert, after all.)

Access

David assured me that no condo building would have private access to the High Line, though the city seems to have found a way around this by allowing the building owners to build a sort of mixed entrances where people can enter from both the building and the street into a vestibule, and then come onto the highline. (The owners of the Caledonia have already signed on for this program.) This leaves room for abuse, of course: The condo owners could just shut the door to the street, or make it small and unappealing, and they could make their vestibule a grand one. David said that each building will be able to negotiate their own entrance rights, which should raise red flags for anybody who knows how these things take shape (give them an inch and they’ll take a mile), and he also said, tellingly, that not every building will be able to afford one of these entrances. (This was supposed to reassure me, I guess, that there won’t be many of them, but it just reinforced my perception that the park is intended for the rich.)

Aesthetics

Anyway, even if the rich do succeed in keeping the rest of us out, the park is no real prize from an aesthetic standpoint. From the slides David showed me, the project itself now seems kind of like a corporate park, with lots of concrete and uncomfortable, backless benches, like one of those plazas you see in midtown, the kind the developers contracted to build to allow their buildings to go higher and then designed in such a way that nobody would want to use them. Oddly, even the plant beds in the High Line Park have concrete threaded through them. And it’s kind of like a Velonakis park as well (I wonder how they avoided using him as the designer), where the paths are close to the benches so that you can’t really escape from the foot traffic. It’s designed to make you move along and not linger, that’s for sure. (This was not inevitable, as there’s plenty of room up there to allow for semi-secluded areas.) The design, in fact, should tip you off as to the park’s real purpose, as well as to who’s calling the shots. It’s also a good example of how everyone, rich and poor alike, loses in the willy-nilly rush to develop and gentrify.

Rezoning

A sore spot in the community is how the city hoodwinked us into supporting the rezoning of West Chelsea as residential. David claimed that the rezoning was going to happen anyway, but that’s misleading at best. Although corporate interests may have eventually pushed the rezoning through, the community would have fought it tooth and nail. In reality, the only reason residents supported the rezoning was because we were so eager to have the High Line

Park built.

Lately I’ve heard people around the neighborhood—some of whom previously supported the park project—say they wished they would have allowed the High Line to have just been torn down. What was once one of the few quiet areas of the city is now being transformed into a densely packed condo corridor.

Views

One of the main selling points of the High Line has been the sweeping views of Manhattan that it will presumably allow strollers to enjoy. However, it seems that the 31-and-counting condo towers that developers have planned for the area will significantly restrict these views. Mandated setbacks may help, though it’s significant that, while we’re still in the early stages of condo construction, the city has already granted at least two exceptions. The Denari-designed building on West 23rd Street will be allowed to overhang the High Line, and the Standard Hotel in the Meat Packing District is actually being built over the top of the line, “straddling” it, as David says. While David agrees that buildings such as these will restrict views, he was quick to show me a slide of an older manufacturing building that straddles the line, saying that, historically, there has been a close connection between the tracks and the buildings along the line, as businesses unloaded freight directly into their buildings.

While David is certainly right about this, consideration of the issue led me in turn to question what would be done with the loading docks that exist in such buildings (David says there’s only one of them left): Would the owner of the building he showed me be allowed to, say, open a restaurant on its loading dock?

Retail Space

Though taken aback by my apparent confusing of the issues, and unable to say what would become of the loading dock in question, David assured me that none of these developers—either in the already existing buildings or the ones to come—would be allowed to open any type of restaurant or retail store on the High Line. And while I’m fairly sure he believes this, I’m a bit more skeptical myself. The developers will be looking for ways to maximize their profits, and they’re no doubt working overtime to weasel concessions in this regard, just like the Caledonia did on the issue of access. (And whoever owns the building with the loading dock is not going to give it up without a fight.) Since it now looks like we’re stuck with the High Line Park, what it increasingly comes down to is whether you favor a sterile corporate mall or a bustling, boutique-and-café-lined avenue in the sky.