With travel restrictions requiring quarantines for many out-of-state visitors to New York City, the normal hordes of tourists on New York's High Line will be absent for months to come.
Washington Post columnist Adrian Higgins checks in the with the High Line in New York City, which has been vacated during the pandemic much like it was before its famous adaptive reuse and evolution into a tourism magnet and a controversial symbol of gentrification.
Now, with the city taking tentative steps to reopen and travel restrictions into New York in place, the High Line is likely to evolve again. Higgins writes:
In the interval between limited reopening and a world back to normal, whenever that may be, the High Line will become something closer to its original idea, a quirky postindustrial gift to the West Side. It may become for New Yorkers what the cultural treasures of Florence and Venice are now for their citizens: havens devoid of the hordes of out-of-towners.
According to Higgins, the Friends of the High Line is actively discussing how to implement and enforce social distancing on the eight-foot wide path, but no decisions have been made yet. It also "may take years for New York to return to the level of tourism — some 65 million visitors a year — it attained before the coronavirus crisis," according to Higgins.
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