Critic's Review: Third Phase of the High Line

The gist of Michael Kimmelman's New York Times review: "If the newest, last stretch of the High Line doesn’t make you fall in love with New York all over again, I really don’t know what to say."

Here is a sampling of the review's sweeping statements about the High Line, its impact on the city, and the soon-to-be-overhauled neighborhood the third phase of the park will weave itself through:

• "But this third phase completes a kind of narrative, which the two earlier phases started, about 21st-century New York as a greener, sleeker metropolis, riven by wealth, with an anxious eye in the rearview mirror. It is a Rorschach test, signifying different things — about urban renewal, industry, gentrification, the environment — to different people." 
• "James Corner Field Operations designed the High Line with Diller Scofidio & Renfro. Mr. Corner calls the city around the park its “borrowed landscape.” The inimitability of those surroundings, and the park’s site-specific detailing, are major reasons the so-called High Line effect has been, like the Bilbao one, fool’s gold for so many other cities that have wanted to follow in New York’s footsteps."
• "The designers avoided pressure to top themselves with the third section, and went the other way. A simple shift in orientation of the planks, where two benches crisscross, suffices to signal the High Line’s turn from north-south to east-west. The turn opens onto a wide plaza, the park’s new crossroad, with stairs connecting to Hudson Yards and what will be Hudson Park and Boulevard beyond."
• "With more limited construction funds, the strategy in this part of the park was bare bones: Rusty tracks are filled in with bonded gravel to make a level path; timber dunnage is stacked to make a bleacher from which people can peer out at the water and over the rail yards; and nature is left to its own devices, giving visitors a glimpse of how the High Line looked before its makeover."