Livin’ The High Line

It’s winter, folks. Even though you can walk around Manhattan in shirtsleeves, and even though a few flowers have put on a surprise late bloom, the High Line begins observing winter hours tomorrow, December 1. Which means it’s your last chance of the year for a late-night stroll in paradise.  But what a night it is: clear, crisp, with a waxing crescent moon. There’s an art film being shown near the lawn, and lots of folks were huddled together watching it when I passed by. And Glenn Close is nearby too; peer over the railing at 22nd Street and you might catch her shooting an episode of “Damages” right in front of the Spears Building.

Before we know it the park will be covered in ice and snow, and the plants, trees and grasses will begin their winter hibernation. But there’s one night left to enjoy, so get off your duff and head over there.

I took this photo a couple of weeks ago, but the weather was similar to today’s: rainy, raw, bone-chilling. There weren’t too many creatures in the park.

A great many people come to this blog looking for dogs on the High Line, and I’m always happy to oblige. Dogs are not, of course, allowed on the High Line, but this is a service dog who lives in the neighborhood. I often see this couple at the Chelsea Piers gym and the dog is a very sweet and well-behaved creature who sits quietly and attentively by the pool as its owner swims. (I’m sure the owner is very sweet too, but that’s beside the point; no one comes here searching for “humans on the High Line.”)

This is one of Manhattan’s Lucky Dogs; being in service means it  has the great privilege of being allowed on the High Line. So if you see this dog, you too will be lucky. That’s what dogs do: they spread the luck around.

And look at the tail. The photo below the slideshow is in focus — everything but the dog’s tail, which is wagging up a storm. This is happiness on the High Line, brought to us by that rarest of rare things: a dog trotting down the Flyover.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. For more dogs, check out the slideshow below, and be sure to click both pages to see all the dogs. There are 27, and counting….

There are as many reasons to admire this book as there are entries to the High Line. So I’ll give you nine.

1. It’s inspirational: a true David and Goliath story, set in post 9/11 New York City, featuring two guys who admit quite charmingly in these pages that they had no idea what they were doing. And they won.

2. It’s spot-on, Zeitgeist-wise: if you’re even remotely interested in the movement of urban landscape design that is sweeping major cities around the world, David & Hammond have just given you the playbook. This book tells the full story of how these two young men, with lots of help from a wide variety of people and over a ten year period, navigated the neighborhood, city, state, corporate, and Federal politics to create this park.

3. It has that magical element that non-fiction readers love: voice. These two guys, in alternating paragraphs, each come across as distinct personalities and as they tell their story we come to know them as individuals. There are other key characters who come alive, including Gifford Miller and the extraordinary Amanda Burden, a woman who has done something I will always be grateful for: she has made New York a better city.

4.  If you love New York…: this a book that will help you understand how and why it works as well as it does under the leadership of Mayor Bloomberg.

5. It’s unsparingly honest. Serious readers know when they’re being jollied along, and these guys give us everything, warts and all: their disagreements, crises of faith and plenty of unpretty moments, like a hangover that could have derailed an important meeting.

6. Marvelous, excruciating detail. Example: Hammond provides the color swatch for the Sherwin-Williams paint color of the High Line’s railings: SW6994. It’s called “Greenblack,” and you too can use it in your own kitchen, just as he did.

7. The photos are gorgeous.

8. It’s a cautionary tale: on every page you marvel that the thing actually got built, that these men didn’t get derailed.

9. The High Line, the glorious “park in the sky.” What’s not to love? Here’s a book that celebrates both the creation — in all its gritty, gnarly detail — and the end result: a park that always inspires, always leaves room for dreaming.

I’ve been writing about the High Line for three and a half years on this blog and I was surprised that I ended up learning something on just about every page of this book. It’s a great story.

Handy Purchasing Links:

Buy HIGH LINE from Posman’s

Buy HIGH LINE from Amazon

Buy HIGH LINE from Powell’s

Buy HIGH LINE from 192 Books

Buy HIGH LINE from BN.com

Buy HIGH LINE from your favorite Indie retailer

Friends of the High Line recently launched a truly inspired fund-raising campaign: Sponsor a Plant. There are more than 100,000 plants in the park, representing 170 species of flowers, 46 kinds of trees, and hundreds of species of grasses, shrubs, vines and bulbs. The now mile-long park requires a huge amount of love and care — pruning, watering, feeding, weeding — and the Friends pay the costs of upkeep.

So today, in the middle of our first Nor’Easter of the Fall season, I adopted a Smokebush. I chose this tree because it’s a shapeshifter and a real drama queen. Throughout the season it changes its shape, color and texture. Today it’s blowin’ in the wind (and battered by the flying slush) but it’s making a great show of its beautiful reddish-purple leaves. Earlier in the season — see the photo below, taken in May — the tree is leggier and it has little fronds that stick out in all directions. It looks like a lady of a certain age sitting under a hair dryer at the beauty salon; all it lacks is last month’s issue of Vogue.

I took a gardening tour of the High Line in the spring and the gardener who escorted my little group described this tree as “Dr. Seussy.” Boy, did she get that right. It’s hard to pass through the Gansevoort Woodland in the middle of May and not break out into hysterical laughter. This is a funny tree, an expressive tree, and a beautiful one too.

You too can sponsor a plant on the High Line. The smokebush Continus ‘Grace’ is a pricey plant (most likely because the High Line has to pay all those licensing fees to the Ted Geisel aka Dr. Seuss estate), but there’s a range of plants available and it includes a wonderful variety:  Smooth sumac (Rhus glabra),  Winterberry,  ‘Red Sprite’ (Ilex verticillata),  the fabulous grass Sideoats grama (Bouteloua curtipendula), thread-leaf bluestar (Amsonia hubrichtii) and, last but not least, the Aster oblongifolius, ‘Raydon’s Favorite.’ Over the past few weeks this last plant has been stunning and has pretty much dominated the landscape. Today the asters, like most of the plants, are encased in ice, and as beautiful as ever.

If you love the High Line here’s another great way to support it: sponsor a plant. You’ll be supporting the landscape and also the amazingly great gardening staff that makes this park run day in and day out, through rain and sleet and hail and gloom of night. They’re out in full force today, shoveling slush so the rest of us can enjoy it.

So make yourself a nice cup of tea and do it now: www.TheHighLine.org.

And if you’re town walk (don’t run) to the park because there’s nothing more beautiful than a garden in a storm.

This evening, in the gorgeous October dusk, I took a walk to the Gansevoort Street entrance of the High Line to meet Ann and walk her home. What a treat awaited us in the Chelsea Passage: the incomparable, incandescent Judy Kuhn was warming up for an evening performance. With a partner I can’t identify she was singing the Sondheim heartbreaker “Being Alive.”

Take my advice and cancel your evening plans. Run (don’t walk) to the High Line. Stand outside the barricades (there’s something afoot, a dinner for Cooper Union, it appears) and treat yourself to the rare opportunity of hearing this great singer. If you can’t — if you’re in Timbuktu and the last flight has departed — go and buy her fantastic CD of Jule Styne songs, “Just in Time.” Judy Kuhn does the best cover of “Time After Time” you’ll ever hear. It’s so romantic it’ll knock your socks off. You won’t know what hit you.

At first, on my way south, I was mildly annoyed to be re-routed in the Chelsea Passage. Hoi polloi tonight have to follow the route that the dairy trains took when the High Line was a working railroad; it goes underneath the main part of the Chelsea Passage, under the wonderful Spencer Finch “River That Flows Both Ways” art exhibit. This is how deliveries were made to the National Biscuit Company building, via the “Southern Spur.” Eggs, milk and butter went in; Fig Newtons, Mallomars and Animal Crackers came out.

But I digress. The detour was more than worth it. To have caught that bit of soaring magic as the sun was setting. Well, it was priceless.