A freight viaduct that was going to be demolished, replanted as a mile-and-a-half elevated park thirty feet above the West Side. Free, and busier than you expect.
Saved by two people and a photograph
The West Side Line was built in the 1930s to lift freight trains off Tenth Avenue, where they had been running at street level and killing so many people the road was called Death Avenue. The last train ran in 1980 carrying three carloads of frozen turkeys. For twenty years the structure sat abandoned, self-seeded with grasses and wildflowers, and CSX wanted it demolished.
Joshua David and Robert Hammond met at a community board meeting in 1999 where they were the only two people arguing against demolition. Joel Sternfeld’s photographs of the overgrown line, taken across a year, did the rest — they showed people what was up there. The first section opened in 2009.
The planting by Piet Oudolf deliberately imitates the self-seeded meadow that grew during the abandoned years, and the original rails are left in place through the plantings in several stretches.
Walking it
A mile and a half, roughly half an hour end to end without stopping, an hour and a half realistically.
South to north is the more logical direction: you start in the Meatpacking District beside the Whitney and finish at Hudson Yards, where the 7 train and The Edge are.
Highlights along the way: the 10th Avenue Square at 17th Street, a sunken amphitheatre with a window looking straight down the avenue; the Chelsea Thicket; the Northern Spur Preserve; and the Interim Walkway in the rail yards section, which is the wildest planting on the line.
The Spur at 30th Street and Tenth Avenue holds a rotating commissioned sculpture on a plinth.
When to go
Early. Before nine on a summer morning it is genuinely lovely, empty, with the light low across the river. By noon on a Saturday it is a single-file shuffle, and the width of the path does not allow for overtaking.
Winter is underrated. The planting is designed to hold its structure through the cold and the seed heads and grasses look better under frost than they do in August, with a fraction of the crowd.
Around it
The southern half runs through Chelsea’s gallery district — the streets in the low 20s between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues hold a large concentration of commercial art galleries, all free to walk into, and Thursday evenings are when they open shows.
Chelsea Market is at the 16th Street exit. Little Island, the artificial park on stems in the Hudson, is a ten-minute walk from the southern end.
More Parks & Green Space
Central Park
Not a surviving piece of wilderness but a landscape built from nothing over sixteen years, including the streams, the hills and the woods. Free, and larger than you think.
Bryant Park
Nine acres of lawn behind the Public Library that were a no-go area in the 1980s and are now the most heavily used park per square foot in the city. Free chairs, free events, free wifi.
Washington Square Park
A marble arch, a fountain full of children and buskers, chess hustlers on the south-west corner, and about 20,000 bodies buried underneath it.