Phase 3 of the High Line, New York City’s ambitious landscape redevelopment project, opened on Saturday, September 20. Since 2006, the High Line has been converting abandoned elevated railroad tressles along 1.45 miles of Manhattan’s Lower West Side into a free public park that parallels the Hudson River.
The first two sections of the park already draw more than five million visitors a year, according Crain’s New York.
The $35 million Phase 3, known as High Line at the Rail Yards, broke ground September 20, 2012, and officially opened to the public on September 21, according to Friends of the High Line, the nonprofit organization that has raised most of the money for the project. This half-mile stretch runs from West 30th Street at 10th Avenue (previously the railway’s northern terminus) to West 34th Street at 12th Avenue, across from the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center.
James Corner Field Operations is the High Line’s designer, working with Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Piet Oudolf.
The newest section—which curves around the 26-acre Hudson Yards real estate development—incorporates some of the old tracks and switches (made safe for pedestrian passage and play), as well as wild plant life.
The opening ceremonies included New York Senator Charles Schumer, New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer, High Line founder and president Joshua Davis, and actor Edward Norton, who is on Friends of the High Line’s board.
The finishing touch will be put in place next year with the installation of a short stub along 10th Avenue and 30th Street, according to the real estate website Curbed.
Related Stories
| Apr 8, 2011
SHW Group appoints Marjorie K. Simmons as CEO
Chairman of the Board Marjorie K. Simmons assumes CEO position, making SHW Group the only firm in the AIA Large Firm Roundtable to appoint a woman to this leadership position
| Apr 5, 2011
Zaha Hadid’s civic center design divides California city
Architect Zaha Hadid is in high demand these days, designing projects in Hong Kong, Milan, and Seoul, not to mention the London Aquatics Center, the swimming arena for the 2012 Olympics. But one of the firm’s smaller clients, the city of Elk Grove, Calif., recently conjured far different kinds of aquatic life when members of the City Council and the public chose words like “squid,” “octopus,” and “starfish” to describe the latest renderings for a proposed civic center.
| Apr 5, 2011
Are architects falling behind on BIM?
A study by the National Building Specification arm of RIBA Enterprises showed that 43% of architects and others in the industry had still not heard of BIM, let alone started using it. It also found that of the 13% of respondents who were using BIM only a third thought they would be using it for most of their projects in a year’s time.
| Apr 5, 2011
Top 10 Buildings: Women in Architecture
Making selections of top buildings this week led to a surprising discovery about the representation of women in architecture, writes Tom Mallory, COO and co-founder, OpenBuildings.com. He discovered that finding female-created architecture, when excluding husband/wife teams, is extremely difficult and often the only work he came across was akin to interior design.
| Apr 5, 2011
What do Chengdu, Lagos, and Chicago have in common?
They’re all “world middleweight cities” that are likely to become regional megacities (10 million people) by 2025—along with Dongguan, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Shenzhen, Tianjin, and Wuhan (China); Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of the Congo); Jakarta (Indonesia); Lahore (Pakistan); and Chennai (India), according to a new report from McKinsey Global Institute: “Urban World: Mapping the economic power of cities”.
