Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes

An International Quarterly

ISSN: 1460-1176 (Print) 1943-2186 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tgah20

Prospect parks: walking the Promenade Planteé

and the High Line

Ray Gastil

To cite this article: Ray Gastil (2013) Prospect parks: walking the Promenade Planteé and
the High Line, Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes, 33:4, 280-289, DOI:
10.1080/14601176.2013.807650

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14601176.2013.807650

Published online: 01 Oct 2013.

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 Prospect parks: walking the Promenade Plantee and the High Line
ray gastil
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When it comes to disused elevated rail lines radically remade into elevated urban
garden paths, Paris and New York lead the way. Today, the Manhattan exem-
plar, the High Line, is the more visited, celebrated, and criticized, but the
Parisian one got there first, with Le Promenade Plantee opening in 1998,
more than a decade before the first segment of the High Line opened in 2009.
Paris is still, from its core to its extremities, a city of ‘firsts’, in public space as in
much else, determined to do more than live off its heritage as the capital of the
nineteenth century. New York, after first rediscovering the value of its streets
and sidewalks, has been equally determined to demonstrate that its urban
identity is not petrified into nostalgia for its heady time as the presumptive
capital of the twentieth century. Even before the first stroke of design intent,
redundant (no longer useful) elevated railways like this have unique character:
they are both disengaged and urban, a place apart and a place connected. The
design decisions about access, plants, materials, restoration, exploit and enrich
this inherent tension.
At the risk of an invidious comparison, the walkway design in New York
seems the more pointed, poignant, and effective in opening up fresh unantici-
pated experiences, making the street and the skyline seem new again (figure 1).
It makes the case, more strongly than in Paris, that there is both the possibility of
and value in framing perceptions and associations in a new, or newly invented,
linear landscape. The design may not force the perspective of a folly or bracket a
painterly copse or cliff as an earlier generation of designers might have done in
their gardens, including public parks, but the work is artful and intentional, and
extremely aware of the walker’s perceptions, and while distinct, impacted by
changes in culture and media, the understanding of visual experience draws on
design ideas beginning before either the nineteenth or the twentieth century. In
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part because of its more built-up context, often running between buildings
rather than alongside an avenue, the High Line has a new view, a new angle, a
new perception, new tunnels, outlooks, overlooks, flyovers, and step-downs at
every block. The greatest risk, as with any landscape depending on novelty and
surprise, is that this could get old. Because it uses the changing, mobile city, not
merely its own devices, for its effects, it may hold on to its youthful exuberance
for a very long time.
For some, however, the Promenade in Paris has a calmness and subtlety
that has a preferable weighting of the Jesuitical endeavor being in but not
necessarily of the city-world (figure 2). And in any case, like the more recent
High Line, the Promenade is a powerful tool for reframing the view of city at
large and a district within it. The intent of this essay is to walk these contem-
porary ‘prospect’ parks, and to interpret them through their effectiveness in
reframing the city, from specific design decisions to the unexpected accidents
and serendipities of their respective urban conditions. The creative leap of
faith in both projects is that the design of the path, its plantings, and edges
can lead to a heightened experience of the strangeness and pleasure of walking
thirty-feet up through a city, different from the opportunities of a conventional
park or sidewalk or building. These are viaducts, and not surprisingly viaducts
offer the greatest parallel, but even there, there is rarely the other foundational
uniqueness of you are in the middle of the city, in close proximity to its rushing
traffic, human and vehicular, but without the need to brace and watch for cars,
bikes, and the other modes of hurtling by on wheels. The experience
has meaning in itself, and implications for the future of cities: how we see,
occupy, and circulate in them, and how we will build the next generation of
urban paths.
issn 1460-1176 # 2013 taylor & francis vol. 33, no. 4
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14601176.2013.807650
 walking the promenade plantee and the high line
The Promenade Plantee benefited from strong public support, though it was
not a Grand Projet. Paris had begun to flex its urbanist muscles with those
projects, with the full force of the state, even before in the 1980s, with projects
such as Bernard Tschumi’s design for le Parc de la Villette, built on the ruins of
Napoleon III slaughter houses, completed in 1987. The Metro Bastille does stop
at a Grand Projet, one that indirectly led to the Promenade. Opening in 1989,
the bicentennial of the French Revolution, the Opera Bastille designed by
Carlos Ottis a gritty landmark today. Time has not been kind to the building’s
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exterior, which looks as though pieces of cladding are ready to fall off, though
one would hardly notice amidst the inexplicable gray complexity. The Gare de
la Bastille was torn down to make way for this edifice, leaving the long tail of the
Vincennes railway without a head. Fortunately the railway’s viaduct, not used
since 1969, survived, becoming the Promenade, also known as la Coulee Verte.
While it may continue to serve an estimable cultural purpose, as an urban
artifact, the Opera lives outside the realm of visual joy, and it is a relief to get
figure 1. High Line, view south towards 10th Avenue Square (photo the author). past its walls and up the 10 meters of stairs to the Promenade (figure 3). The
avenue Dausmenil at grade is also engaging, because this 1.5 km 70-arch
viaduct’s renovation was conceived and implemented both above and below.
Above, a walkway thick with plantings and rich in views, brick arches that both
span streets, creating 45 archways that have been filled in with glass to constitute
the Viaduc des Arts ne Viaduc Dausmenil (figure 3).
It is a handsome piece of industrial infrastructure, with an almost Roman
grandeur, which is not undone by the glass infill, detailed to make sure that the
arches still read clearly. Not all elements of the vision for the Viaduc came to
pass: the idea was that one would see artisans at work in their vaulted studios. (If
you crave some evidence or at least the memory of fabricating activity of the
artisans in the design-related trades, there are impasses with courts and studios
east of the Bastille.) We still crave a visibly artisanal city, but that vision rarely
aligns with how we actually make and distribute (and price leasable retail space
along a major street) today.
East of the Bastille is not an area highlighted on most tourist maps of the city.
Yet in an era fascinated by the infrastructure of its recent past, there are many
rewards beyond the viaduct itself. To the hard right southwest, there is a piece of
not yet entirely redundant industrial infrastructure, the Bassin de L’Arsenal. This
Parisian ‘high line’ is mostly not a tunnel between buildings, but closer to a
corniche, with buildings tight on the north, and then open to a broad sidewalk
figure 2. Promenade Plantee (photo the author). and avenue, an intimidating drop below on the other side. Not that you get very
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figure 3. Viaduc Dausmenil (photo the author).
close to that edge, much of the way there are plantings on both sides, both low
and high, flowering and green, from bamboo to cherry trees, with breaks where
the path expands. Sometimes the buildings on the north are very close—you
could climb off the path onto their balconies, and from the graffiti, people have
done just that. There are lovely moments: the two long ponds, with trellises and
delicate walks across them, where lovers and other families photograph one
another. It has the feel of a local excursion for the people who live here, a fine
walk whether the day is wet or clear (figure 4).
There is, of course, architecture and urbanism to admire, including the vast
Gare de Lyon and its yards. There are also turn-of-the-century before Parisian
bourgeois classics, confidently florid architecture, yet unevenly spaced and with
gap toothed awkwardness amidst the curves and gilt, unlike wealthier, more
finished districts than the 12th arrondissement (figure 5). To the north, there are
views into the streets and courts of very kempt and renovated apartment houses
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figure 4. Promenade Plantee (photo the author).
in a very different, crisp, patterned, and gabled pre-modernist designs. There is
also what may rank among the more uncanny moments in Parisian architecture,
like an idea from a world’s fair that would not go away — the arrondissement
police station. It has the grace notes and horizontal style of France’s post-1925
high chic, and then, why not caryatids? And why not Michelangelo’s ‘Dying
Slave’ from the early sixteenth century, carved for a pope, bigger than the larger-
than-life original in the Louvre, 12 · over and closely spaced, updated into
machine-cut modernity, as though Fernand Leger decided to help out
Michelangelo with the twentieth century. It is good to be close to caryatid
height, and contemplate the role of art and architecture and public works, in
Paris, almost a hundred years ago. But back to the more recent public work, the
Promenade.
There is much more to the Promenade. It has a dramatic moment where it
runs between the sharp diagonals of modern housing (figure 6), and it comes to
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figure 5. Promenade Plantee (photo the author).

ground at the Chateau de Reuilly (on the site of Reuilly Château dating to the
seventh century) and then, again, plays with our sense of how we move from a
city, dropping to 10 meters below instead of above, into a railroad cut. The
range of experiences on this path is extraordinary, though if you have to choose,
take the high road. It is orderly, not, say, a Situationist derive, and yet it has the
quality of an urban exploration, cutting through a city in a way that is impossible
by car, and, usually, impossible on foot, as well.
The Coulee takes you all the way to the boulevard Peripherique, where you
can go on to the Bois de Vincennes, or perhaps, to have a full sense of the
Viaduct, backtrack west to the Boulevard des Marechaux, and heading south
about a half kilometer back to the Avenue Dausmenil by the Porte Doree.
There are numerous bike stations and one can bike west to the center of Paris,
along the avenue named for one of Napoleon’s generals who ended his days in figure 6. Promenade Plantee (photo the author).
Vincennes defending an unpopular Bourbon (Paris was first, again, with rental

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 studies in the history of gardens and designed landscapes: gastil
bikes, a half-decade before New York’s version, planned to come on line in
2013). There is a dedicated bikeway along much of the avenue, and soon after
the Place Dausmenil, a cyclist at the Viaduc des Arts again, is free to stroll along
the glass-fronted shops, one of them with a smart model of the viaduct itself.
It is a different type of city experience, not strolling on the Boulevards like the
nineteenth -century flaneur, not deliberately lost in the back alleys of the Marais
like a tourist of today, nor the interior passages further west. Like the High Line
after it, the Promenade is inspiring imitators around the world. Rabelais, who
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never saw a railroad much less one that is an exemplar of ‘adaptive reuse’, wrote
of ‘chemins qui cheminent’, which one might translate conveniently as path-
finding paths. The Coulee Verte is one of those, an example of the Parisian
capacity to reinvent its urbanism and develop new ways to incorporate the
infrastructure of its past in implementing the green, sustainable aspirations for
the future at the heart of much of today’s urban design. Paris was first, and while
it may not really stand the test for the very best for this type of path in this
particular moment, it is a very fine place to walk, look, and wonder: what will be
the next step in the urbanism of Paris?
When you walk the High Line on a sunny spring morning, you might ask the
same question for New York, where do you go from here? New York, like
Paris, has pushed hard to discover ‘found’ open space, whether the middle of the
street with traffic right-of-way turned over to parks on Broadway, or in the
Brooklyn Greenway, a bike and pedestrian way running along both post- and
currently industrial waterfronts. With the arrival of container shipping in the
1960s, vast stretches of waterfront and adjacent industries lost their economic
relevance, including the High Line itself, which ran its last train in 1980.
Railroads had already lost much of their market to trucking. Moreover, there
was no real need to separate out freight traffic from the street, because the port
was gone. Along the length of the High Line, you can look out to those disused
docks, now reinvented as sports clubs, golf driving ranges, and open space,
bordered by the green band of the Hudson River Park esplanade. One runs at
grade, between the heavily trafficked West Street (there had been an elevated
highway, it was razed) and the Hudson River, while the other is thirty feet in the
air, but they are dizygotic twins, joined by their maritime origins.
Both are subject to concerns about costs and benefits. The High Line, which
is, if you chose to look at it this way, a bargain as a piece of public art, not so
much as a public park, does engender important questions about its replic-
ability, and the larger question, still with us today as it was when Central Park
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was built: should resources go to a glistening new park, or to the neighbor-
hoods. When does it make sense, ethically, economically, and even esthetically,
for great concentrations of private and public money to be dedicated to
projects whose main users are likely to be highly privileged, a question that
could be asked every time an opera is performed, whether at the Opera Bastille
or the Metropolitan in New York. This essay’s point is that the most powerful
argument for this type of reuse of an elevated railway is that it can prompt
people to see the city in a new way, and as such it can bracket, but not dismiss,
questions about the impact or lack of one, of the High Line on the parts of
New York that you don’t see from the High Line. The first question though, is
whether the High Line succeeds in its own terms, and then, does it offer lessons
in design that can be meaningful across a section of different urban spaces and
communities?
At the High Line, it all begins with the built embodiment of the paradig-
matic drawing of the modern movement, a section. Before it was built, the
most memorable image of the project, which was designed by a team headed
by James Corner Field Operations and DillerScofidio + Renfro, was of the stub
end of the High Line at Gansevoort Street, sliced off in 1991. The drawing is a
perspectival rendering, not a section, yet it is the cut that explains the clarity of
the designers’ vision, dramatizing the open wound of the 1933 structure, and
the beginning of a design that is relentless in its attention to both section and
perspectival framing. And for all the pleasing greenery, both from the unin-
tentional past and highly crafted present, growing on it, there is a fittingness to
a section cut being the introductory vision of a project rising above a meat
market.
In design, sections are usually an abstraction that is part of the conceptual
and building process for architects and contractors, but here was the oppor-
tunity to literalize that sectional approach, with an elevated railway that cut
through buildings and streets, that had to be carved into to allow for access
and view, and again and again compels the viewer to see the layered complex-
ity of the city. And unlike most projects, especially esthetically ambitious ones,
the renderings were made flesh by the project. Buildings, and landscapes, often
fail against the standard of the drawings that spawned them. Not the High
Line.
In part, this is because there has rarely been as much talent and resources
dedicated to a project. It certainly did not start as the equivalent of a Grand
Projet, but it ended as one. It first captured the city’s design imagination in 1981,
 walking the promenade plantee and the high line
when architect Steven Holl drew a series of houses along it. Ultimately,
the High Line’s reuse was driven by Robert Hammond and Joshua David,
two nonprofit amateur animators who led an extended process beginning in
1999 that never underestimated power of a visualized idea to stimulate New
Yorkers. They held both an ideas competition, exhibited at Grand Central
Terminal, and a competition that led to the design that was implemented. In
the end, they operated with the full support of the Bloomberg administration,
with major public as well as private support, a new plan and zoning for the
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district, and the unrelentingly close watch and consultation of city leaders
determined that the High Line would be a legacy of the city’s vision and cultural
preeminence.
And for many, including the founders, the greatest fear was that they would
kill the thing they loved. This was in part because so much of the poetics of the
High Line was that it was an astonishing relic, weaving through a district that
was a sort of reliquary itself, which somehow made its breathtaking views of the
city and its own scrappy, resilient landscape, eloquent. Joel Sternfeld, who had
an eye for past infrastructures, and had completed the photographs for a recent
ideas competition on the Hudson Railyards driven by Phyllis Lambert, created
the first widely seen compelling images of the abandoned High Line, in a series
published in The New Yorker in May 2001. It was the moment that the High
Line came to make sense to a much wider audience than before, and it was also a
perpetual caution against what might be lost. The existing plants were harvested
for their seeds for replanting for the High Line’s final design, the rails were
cleaned and reused, the original structure was scraped clean, and almost all of it is
still there.
But it really does look different, and of course works differently, and there are
400 species on the High Line Plant List. And while there’s lots of black metal, it
really is not about grit anymore. You still see the signs for ‘Quality Veal’ on meat
market building in the first segment, but that’s right next to the rising Whitney
Museum. The cut stub is now known as the Tiffany & Co. Foundation
Overlook. There are echoes of an accidental, volunteer landscape of the
Gansevoort Woodland, but the shimmering white bark of the nearly 20-foot-
high birches, the meticulously placed perennials, and the knowledge that Giant
Solomon’s Seal is the plant of the week, make it clear that this is a tended,
curated garden, reflecting its intense maintenance, the vision of planting figure 7. High Line, view north from Gansevoort Woodland to Standard Hotel (photo the
designer Piet Oudolf, and a programming intent of education and engagement author).
(figure 7),
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 studies in the history of gardens and designed landscapes: gastil
The armature of the walkway is concrete planks, a foot across, for a route that
sustains eight feet of clear path. The planting bed borders are corten steel. The
path moves from one side to the center to the other, it shifts where the railway
shifts, and it does it cleverly, with lines of planks petering out like tuning forks to
allow the welcome weeds to grow while another series of planks starts up on the
other side. The benches, designed as if the plank slowly veered up and metamor-
phosed into seating (figure 8), are handsome, though you are more likely to sit on
the more comfortable folding chairs provided where the walkway widens. There
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really is not a normative stretch of the High Line — in addition to the regular
interruption of street crossings, the route is rarely straight, it has spurs and stops and
cuts. Below 14th Street, where the streets predate the Manhattan grid, two new
buildings bridge over the High Line. The most successful is the towering slab of
the Standard Hotel, where the opening for the High Line is high and wide. North
of 14th Street, in the grid, a new city plan and rezoning prevails, one which does
figure 8. High Line, bench (photo the author).
286
not permit any new building above the right of way, and works very hard to keep
the buildings set back, and to strictly limit connections between buildings and the
High Line, to make sure that it feels public, and a place apart, not a porch for the
new apartment buildings edging up to it.
One of the most complex stretches of the High Line is from the Sundeck just
south of 15th Street to the 10th Avenue Square (in the air) at 17th. Just two
blocks long, but given the complexity of the line here (it bends, has spurs into
buildings, and has a long cut through the one-time Nabisco complex), it is a
demonstration of how much the new design harnesses the preexisting form, and
how much it works with it. The sundeck, with its woody interpretation of
lounge chairs, overlooks the walkway and the Hudson and the sunset beyond.
Much of the Chelsea Market Passage is occupied by a restaurant, coming
dangerously close to undoing the assiduously crafted zoning regulations
intended to keep the passage from being privatized, yet at the same time quite
effective in animating what would otherwise be a rather dark and dismal stretch.
The spurs, which once entered the buildings to the west, are planted, and off
limits. It is the one place where you can fully imagine what the High Line was
like during its abandoned phase (though not technically abandoned, the legisla-
tion that made the project possible identifies railways as ‘disused’ not abandoned,
and they could theoretically, some day, once again be part of the transportation
network.) The effect is remarkably successful, in part because as at so many other
points along the High Line, there is more than one story, more than one view.
There is not just the view of the replanted relic, but also of an amazing street
section — there are the spurs themselves, the sky bridges between warehouses
overhead, and an open view to the Hudson to the south.
One of the great dilemmas for a design like this is how to allow for views off
the railway, without cutting out too much of the existing railings, and without
encouraging people to go too close to the railings themselves. (The entire
project is a triumph over our risk-averse times in that it allows people to walk
above a street, and above roadways, without sealing them within metal cages
typical, and often legally required, for pedestrian overpasses.). Here, the
designers dropped below the level of the tracks, allowing viewers to look
straight up 10th Avenue (figure 9). There is nothing especially striking about
the view; there are better angles and better buildings to see in this neighborhood,
but it frames a view that is almost impossible to see any other way, and engages
the viewer in the street without the danger or inconvenience of oncoming
traffic. It is the most cinematic moment in the High Line, where the New York
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figure 9. High Line, view north from 10t Avenue Square (photo the author).
street, an icon of American popular entertainment, is re-represented. Here is,
without a police procedural drama, what you spend so much time looking at.
And it is also cinema that works both ways. Standing in the ‘screen’, the visitor
becomes part of another picture plane, for pedestrians looking up to the still
strange new park.
The second section of the Highline opened in 2011, and its southern anchor is
the 23rd Street Lawn and Seating Steps. The lawn is perhaps the greatest break
with the image the High Line as it was, yet it is highly effective in underscoring
the surprise and dissonant pleasure — a lawn on the roof! It is also the epicenter
of architectural ambition for the project, where a slim, leaning building designed
by Neil Denari, literally pushing the allowable building envelope, together with
the lawn, produces an indelible marker of the built environment in the early
twenty-first century. A marker that 100 000 people might share on a good
weekend (figure 10).
North of 23rd, the path converts from planks to a grated ‘boardwalk’,
the flyover. The walls of the surrounding buildings come closer, relieved
by the openings at the cross streets, which include views to some of New
York’s most extraordinary industrial landmarks, like the 1931 Starrett-
Lehigh Building to the west on 26th Street. But it is here that the planting
figure 10. High Line, 23rd Street Lawn with view of HL23 building designed by Neil
M. Denari Architects (photo the author).
also takes one of its most ambitious turns. On an elevated path, evocative
of a conservatory, archeological site, and boardwalk, you walk high above
the plantings, at eye level with the big leaf magnolias. The flyover also
offers the opportunity to veer off, onto diagonals, still elevated, taking in
the city from a different angle. At times, the project seems like a catalogue
of experiences, an exercise in the sheer pleasure of how many different
things you can do with a path. You can elevate it. You can drop it down
below the datum. You can turn it at a diagonal. And in addition to this
schedule of the operations you can take with a path, there’s the object
lessons in framing. The tools are plants, walls, frames, ramps, and steps
(figure 11).
At the north end of the second segment, past the wildflower field, there’s a
final orchestrated view, looking at the Western Rail Yards, a huge building site
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figure 11. High Line, Philip A. and Lisa Maria Falcone Flyover (photo the author).
for the city, where the third and final segment of the High Line is scheduled for
restoration and use, winding around the vast yard, almost touching the Hudson,
and coming to rest just beyond the southern edge of the Javitz Convention
Center (figure 12). For now, you can see the High Line and the still undecked
rail yards. It is here, in the northern blocks, that the full scale of new residential
building spurred by the High Line can be seen, a reminder of the full scale of the
plan for the High Line and its adjacent blocks, which goes beyond the flowering
of boutique buildings. There’s also one final mediated experience. A yellow-
green elevator ride down to grade, and out into a rapidly changing place, once
an industrial edge of huge warehouses, now touted as New York’s next great
place to live and work.
The designers, at least Diller+Scofidio, in their presentations and discussion
of the design invoked the importance of having a very light hand, of
not transforming the High Line too much, invoking Miesvan der Rohe’s
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figure 12. High Line, view northwest of rail yards and unfinished third segment of High Line
(photo the author).
‘beinahenichts’. From the street, the High Line does often look almost
unchanged, except for the throngs of walkers. Yet on the level of the High
Line, it is much more than that, and had to be. It is almost a lesson book in how
to creatively manipulate a walkway, and to use the tools of landscape architec-
ture and architecture to do it. It is also a manual on how to frame views, as
intense as the suggested photography viewpoints along a national monument.
And like a national monument, it is struggling with being too much loved,
because while there are many High Lines, for many visitors, even the most
robust designs can lose their gravitas and verve to global tourism. Yet they are
there, not only because of the guides and books that tell them and us it is
important, but because it is a new, or at least renewed idea, a linear urban park as
a consummate work of art, and one that uses New York, its architecture, its
plants, and its people, as part of the composition.
 walking the promenade plantee and the high line
It is also one of the most ambitious public spaces of the twenty-first century
in North America, both in its expectations for the experience of its visitors, and
for its anticipated impact on the city. The Promenade Plantee may be longer,
slower one, but it fits clearly in a revivified agenda of harnessing the open space
and visual interest of urban infrastructure in the city, from summertime’s sandy
‘le plage’ along the banks of the Seine to the network of bike paths, on street
and off, that now lace the city, in Paris and in New York. It is a critical
reminder that the most valuable public space is not always at grade, on the
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sidewalk or the boulevard, but that the topography of the city is more complex,
and that we live in section, not only in plan, and that the monocultures of
much of our street trees and urban paths and even parks are a choice, not a
necessity. Neither are perfect, neither will have all their intended impacts, but
they both make a powerful case for the creative complexity of urban life, an
argument that will need to be made again, and again, in this century.
Stuckeman School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, Penn State
289