Annette Koh

Image from Vintage Everyday

The High Line used to connect meatpacking companies with a New York Central RR yard in midtown Manhattan—the railroad ran below Riverside Park and resurfaced about 72nd. (The main route ran down Park Avenue, underground from around 90th to Grand Central Station, which is why there’s such a sharp contrast between upscale Park Avenue and Spanish Harlem Park Avenue, with a long-operating outdoor produce market—the first place I saw plàtanos—at major intersections below the railroad viaduct.)

In 1969 I worked on a former NYC route (West Shore of the Hudson) where a fellow-worker told me that one summer night, a crew working in that midtown yard lost track of a carload of live hogs destined for a slaughterhouse down the High Line. The crew went home around 11pm and by 10 the next morning the hogs started dying of heat and dehydration. Pretty soon the emergency phones were jammed by West Side apartment dwellers nearly overcome by the smell of pig shit and decomposition; according to the story, the Fire Department had to come in wearing gas masks, cut the car open, and dispose of the carcasses. (Did they toss them in the river? Must have been a temptation.) 

I used to like the High Line when it was a rusting relic of bygone industry casting its shadow over the streets of Chelsea.

While most people really want to enjoy the pleasures of fine buildings, good stores, and beautiful urban spaces, the processes that create them make the city more abstract, more dependent on international capital flows, and more responsive to the organization of consumption than the organization of production. (p. 54, emphasis added)

In other words without so many “-ion” endings, making places pretty makes them even more part of a global system that can make you more vulnerable.