About six years ago the first section of the now celebrated High Line was opened in New York and made a palpable hit both locally and internationally. Locally it revealed what one might have guessed, that the inhabitants of Manhattan’s downtown suffered a severe lack of amenity. Every place to walk or run or ride a bike, every place to exercise the dog, is valuable and well used. This new and unusual park, restoring and converting the tracks of a disused overhead railway, was reserved neither for running nor biking nor walking the dog, but rather for strolling, sitting and sunbathing, and for the novelty of looking in on buildings old and new, from unusual angles and with an unusual degree of impertinence. That is, it soon became something of a place for voyeurs and exhibitionists — men with large chests, for instance.
But it also, to an incomprehensible degree, attracted international tourists — five million visitors a year by now to an ugly part of the city that used to house the meatpacking district. It seems always crowded, like the passeggiata of a small Italian town, but whereas I think I understand the spirit of the passeggiata — one saunters forth in the cool of the evening, to see and be seen by one’s fellow citizens — I do not understand what the tourists at the High Line expect. To be seen by fellow tourists? To hook up with manly mesomorphs? I don’t get it. Certainly nobody seems to be paying attention to the plants.
New Yorkers, who tend to be rather vague about the subject of gardening, sometimes say that the planting of the High Line is essentially an ingenious collection of weeds. In fact it is kept meticulously weed-free. They might, at a more sophisticated level, say that it is a collection of native plants.
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