The High Line Is Captivating

"But why does this particular improbable scheme seem to be rocketing toward realization, cheered on by almost everyone?

...[A]s a preservationist project, it has a cool, perverse, slightly un-American kind of sensibility that appeals to this city's creative class. The High Line is not some grand old Beaux Arts train station or banking hall that's easy to like and to transform into cute, lucrative shops and restaurants... It was never pretty or glorious, just a naked, Depression-era steel-and-concrete thing that a quarter-century of desuetude has only made more odd and homely and melancholy, an exquisite corpse.

...Even after it's spiffed up by a team of supercool designers and opened to the public as a narrow (30 to 60 feet) mile-and-a-half-long promenade, it will retain a good deal of its mad, overgrown, ruin-of-the-industrial-age quality—after all, it passes right through two buildings, like some impossible folly dreamed up by Bruce McCall in a Piranesian mode."

Thanks to ArchNewsNow