More High Line

Courtesy of the Friends of the High Line website.

This picture helps illustrate one of the features of the High Line I was originally doubtful of. While the flooring changes, most of it is these long concrete panels, which are there to, I suppose, hint at the linearity of rails and be vaguely reminiscent of the sidewalk and hence the New York City fabric.

Where the flooring gives in to grassy spots, as it does with some frequency, the boards thin and rise up in a sort of wave, which is what this picture doesn't show. At first I thought it broke the unity of it, and felt quite superfluous. But because they rise up, the effect of the grass poking through is quite complete. It becomes quite wild - more so than ordinarily, as though it were coming of its own free will through borders. It feels like wild growth is possible, responsible, and also very much controlled and unthreatening.

Very well done.

The High Line

Went to New York on Sunday, largely to see the High Line, which just opened. Sitting in a park, especially a well-desigened, peaceful park, like walking through it, is a wonderful feeling. Perhaps not usually what one goes to the city for, but I would posit that a quiet environment within a quiet environment cannot match the feeling of islandness, where traffic noice and a wind over the Hudson mouth become the same background vibration, where one has the feeling of being within a beating heart, amidst people, yet on some level alone, somewhat removed.

It's like the feeling, in a way, of being alone in a crowd. That alienation in The Scream, in some Hopper paintings. It's a feeling that is supposed to be a rude shock, a physical manifestation of the alienation of modern life, of a city where neither fellow humans nor god have any relation to us at all.

To me, it is a wonderful feeling. It makes me feel alive, vibrant, part of something, in a way that mere companionship, wonderful as it is, cannot. Alone in a crowd, one is a cell in the city's meta-organism.