the high line

so, for those of you who don't know what the high line is, the high line is an elevated rail line in manhattan that has been abandoned since 1980. it is located in west chelsea along 10th and 11th avenues between 34th street and just below 14th street and runs about a mile and a half total, with several twists and turns along the way. it also goes through 2 buildings, which is pretty cool, though a bit spooky late at night. since it was abandoned 26 years ago, it has become overgrown with "weeds", wildflowers, trees, shrubbery, etc. and is pretty intriguing to anyone who likes the idea of a wild, elevated walkway in the middle of new york city. some people who appreciated it for what it was got together in the late 90s and formed a group to fight plans to tear it down. it has since been saved from demolition and will now be turned into a "park," though i'm weary about how commercial they intend to make it. anyway, if you want to know more about it's history, there is a pretty interesting and informative site here.

at any rate, the following was my experience on the high line:

first of all, i should forewarn you, my camera takes crappy night pictures, so i played with photoshop a bit, but i could only do so much. also, it was very wet and misty that night, so sometimes there were little drops of moisture on the lens. it really sucks because it was really beautiful up there and i wish i could've done a better job of capturing that.

anyway, the story is, i wanted to get up on the high line, but had resigned myself to it not happening because things having not worked out. then, in what ended up being a pretty fortunate turn of events, my friend ditched me on wednesday night for some birthday party she apparently forgot she had promised to attend. my other friend beth, who had scored me the apartment i was staying in, was busy cleaning up there in preparation for it's owner coming back the next day. so i was left to my own devices and i began walking around manhattan. well, walking toward the high line at least. i just wanted to see it and then i would go to some bar, maybe barcade and school some tapper (root beer..yeah right!) or frogger.

so i walked from the east village over to the other end of the island and up the length of the high line, all along the way scoping it out, looking for possible entrances/exits. i'd already read up on it and found that there was apparently only one way up and one way down, but i thought i'd check anyway. sure enough, aside from some tricky maneuvers on fire escapes that only a professional gymnast might be able to pull off, i found no alternate entrances/exits. so i walked up from 12th st. at 10th ave. to 33rd st. where the entrance supposedly was. the entrance is in a fenced-in truck parking lot and, apparently, there is sometimes an attendant there, and you just have to walk in with a sense of purpose so as not to invite suspicion. the most recent account i could find of someone getting on the high line mentioned an attendant, so i was assuming that there would be one there. and there was no way i could pass for a trucker, so i just assumed i wouldn't be able to get up there. fortunately there wasn't one though, so i walked into the parking lot and looked for the entrance, which was behind some of the trucks. i hoisted myself up on a wall, thanks to some cinder blocks someone had stacked right in front of it, most likely for the same purpose, and i was on the high line.

at first i was pretty nervous, because you're almost at ground level. pedestrian-wise, it's a pretty dead part of town, but there are cars everywhere. specifically, there were 2 police cars parked across the street on 34th. granted, they were empty, but i was paranoid that one or both of them would come out of whatever building they were in while i was right there in front of them, blatantly trespassing. so i crouched as i walked, though in retrospect it probably made little to no difference. and shortly after, i got to a point where i could stand up without being too obvious. here is the first picture i took:

it's really sad to me that the pictures of the cityscape didn't turn out better:

one of the first things you pass on the high line is the start of the LIRR. it would be easy to hop onto the top of a train from here:

i realized i had to pee really badly, so when i saw a billboard, i decided that it would be the perfect spot, and the urine began to flow (i did not take a picture of this).

early on, the line forked, and i had to decide which path to take. one path had a significant obstacle, and so i decided to take the other one. unfortunately, i soon found that it was a dead end:

so i walked back to the path with the obstacle, which was a corrugated steel barricade with barbed wire at the top and on the sides:

you see the little door in the middle? it's not the type with a knob. it was just this square in the middle that was chained with a very thick chain and very big padlock to the barricade. fortunately, it was loose enough that i could just squeeze through. if i weighed 50 pounds more, i don't know if i'd have been able to.

shortly after that, i came to another barricade:

you'll notice there's no door on that one. fortunately, there's a small space at the bottom in the center where someone had bent upward part of the barricade. you can barely see it, but it's right at the lighter-colored part in the middle of the barricade. so i had to wriggle like a worm on the ground to get through it. fortunately there were rocks underneath rather than dirt. again, if i had been a larger person, i don't think i would've been able to get past the barricade.

so i get through and...uh is that a miniature xmas tree lit up?

yes...yes it is.

but tying for strangest thing i saw while i was up there was this:

why is there a flat screen tv up here? i can see no reason why someone would want to lug it all the way up there in the first place. i'm pretty sure it would be impossible to get it past all the obstacles anyway. it could've been junked by someone throwing it out of their apt. window onto the high line, but the nearest buildings were storage buildings. odd..

this next not-so-great picture was meant to show the section of the high lines i call The Woods.

what doesn't show up so well is that the middle of the path is pretty much blocked by a lot of trees. i had to go around them on the side. i bet it looks awesome in the summer when they have all their leaves.

after this was a long stretch of less photographically-interesting things. also, i hadn't recharged my batteries in a while and i was afraid they'd die at any time. on top of that i didn't know how much memory i had left on the memory card, so i didn't know how many more pictures i could take and i was trying to only take pictures of the most interesting things.

so after a while, i came to the first building that the high line runs through:

it was hard to walk in some places in there. there was a lot of scrap metal, barbed wire, fencing, long metal bars, planks of wood, etcetc. there were some really cool things inside though:

this was only one of the odd metal sculptures that i found there. the pictures of the others didn't turn out very well.

there were also some old turnstiles:

which is odd, since the high line was a commercial rail line and never took passengers.

the side that was behind the turnstiles and sculptures:

the first building it went through was still in use, so there were lights on and it illuminated the enclosed area. the second building it went through was abandoned though, and it was a little bit creepy, because you couldn't see very well:

there was one last barrier before the end. you can't really make it out so well, but it was just a large fence with barbed wire surrounding it:

it looked pretty insurpassable. but what you can't see is that the barbed wire does not continue all the way down the right side. i had to stand up on the edge of the right wall and gingerly step over the fence part and jump down to the other side. though it was potentially dangerous (if you fell off the side, you'd most likely die), it wasn't really that difficult to do and i got over to the other side okay.

it was only a block or so until the end and i didn't take any pictures of the rest of the way. basically, it was the most overgrown area of the entire line and it was difficult to walk through as a result. there were all kinds of trees, shrubs, vines, tall grass, etcetc. again, it would be awesome to see in the summer. i ended up scaring a couple of birds residing in the midst of it all, as well as myself, when i stepped on a twig and they suddenly flew up right in front of me and out into the night sky.

on the way back, i got a random street shot:

and one last skyline shot (it had gotten very foggy at this point):

it was ridiculously fun and probably even more fun since i was alone. i love exploring abandoned/forgotten/unknown places and if it's illegal to do so, hey, so much the better! there's always a feeling of excitement that comes with knowingly breaking the law, even if it's something that's not all that serious. so, to anyone that has the ability to do so, i highly recommend checking out the high line while you still have the chance. it's anyone's guess when they will begin developing it, so you may be fucked if you wait too long.