The High Line as it looked in August
Like just about everybody else, I love the new High Line in Manhattan. So it is easy to enjoy a recent piece about public spaces in the New Yorker. Written by Lauren Collins, the newly-created (and mixed blessing) pedestrian mall at Times Square is juxtaposed to the sassier and more unexpected park that is the High Line. I am particularly enjoying some of its other sobriquets, like the Thigh Line.
Here’s a sampling:
According to the Post, guests have been putting on amateur skin shows in the floor-to-ceiling windows of the new Standard Hotel, at Thirteenth Street, which straddles what is referred to as the Thigh Line. (The hotel is the Eyeful Tower.)…The spontaneous rise of High Line lowlife seems to suggest a conservation theory of seediness: root it out in one place, and it will sprout up somewhere else. Whack a mole, and you may find, across town, the mole whacking itself.
The High Line, with its exposed tracks and sprays of wildflowers, might be considered a foil to Times Square. Lobbied for by designers and musicians, it is intended to convey instant insouciance. It is an indie park, an anti-campus, a pair of pre-ripped skinny jeans to Times Square’s creased 550s. The Times Square plaza dissipates into the sidewalk, but the High Line is a tight and narrow catwalk, a picture with a frame. Chelsea boys, JDaters, and pretty women, dressed in rompers, promenade in front of people-watchers, perched like fashion editors on wooden benches: urbe in rus.