Freight trains once rumbled here, through the heart of Manhattan's meatpacking district, on tracks you can still walk. The High Line was built in 1934 to carry meat and produce directly into the upper floors of factories and warehouses on the West Side, keeping freight trains off the dangerous street-level rail lines that had killed so many pedestrians that Tenth Avenue was nicknamed Death Avenue. The last train ran in 1980.
The rusting structure sat derelict for twenty years, wild plants growing through the tracks, until in 1999 two neighborhood residents, Joshua David and Robert Hammond, launched a campaign to transform it into an elevated park rather than demolish it. After a decade of advocacy and design, the first section opened in 2009. It is now one of the most visited attractions in New York and has remade the neighborhoods below it, inspiring hundreds of similar elevated park projects worldwide.
Walk up the stairs and look north along the old rail corridor; the views of the Hudson and the city below are unlike anything at street level.