Livin’ The High Line

I have left town for a week — my first vacation of the year, and much-needed — and find myself in my own garden pulling weeds. It’s very quiet here on a small mountain along the Hudson River in Columbia County. Frequently a train goes by and toots its horn. If it’s a big one — a long CSX freight train — I can even feel it rumbling through the house. “The rhythm of the rails,” as Steve Goodman wrote in “City of New Orleans.” Cue Arlo Guthrie.

As I was weeding this morning, before a thunder storm rolled in, I was thinking about that other rail bed down south, and it occurred to me that one of the most striking features of the High Line is how quiet it is. For the two years that Section Two was under construction we worried about the noise that would come from thousands of people passing by our windows.  I heard that around 35,000 walked through the park during the Gay Pride weekend.

But it’s completely, astonishingly, quiet down there.

There’s something about the High Line that not only slows people down but quiets them too. In two years I’ve never heard anyone screaming into a cellphone. Today, people who sit on the lawn seem to speak in whispers; there are buildings all around us to amplify the sound but I’ve not yet overheard a single conversation. No radios or boom boxes. Occasionally a small child shrieks in joy but that’s always a welcome interruption.

Of course it wasn’t this way when the trains were running. In 2003 a woman named Patricia Fieldsteel described in The Villager what it was like when she moved into an apartment near Gansevoort Street.

“Slightly before 2:50 a.m. the building began to quiver and shake: an unearthly shrill series of screeches, wheezings and the rattlings of Brobdingnagian chains seemed headed straight for the window by my bed. I groped for my glasses and peered out between the dusty slats of the Venetian blinds. A decrepit freight train was creeping out of the south side of the Manhattan Meat & Refrigeration Warehouse across the street. Huge refrigerated trucks were parked along Washington St., their motors running, spewing noxious fumes that were already seeping through my closed windows. Then the raw steer carcasses started to roll and the odor of blood and hacked-apart flesh mixed with the other charming aromas. The High Line was making its deliveries….”

The High Line is more connected to the city itself than any other park in New York, running as it does right through the middle of busy streets and up along the avenue. And yet it’s so startlingly quiet. It’s possible that this is the effect that great and beautiful design has on us. It’s humbling to walk through such a lovely place, particularly when you’re surrounded by reminders of a complex society, both industrial and technological, on both sides and at every step along the way. It’s a place that allows you to slow down and think.

I’m glad that the people who run the park are closing it early on days when there are massive crowds downtown. Whatever the reason, the effect is that it preserves this idea of the High Line as a place apart. It’s not a spot for partying and ballyhoo — there are tons of great places to go for that.  It’s the quiet park, and somehow — at least so far — the millions of people who pass through it every year seem to appreciate that.

A quite wonderful thing is happening on the High Line in section two: the birds are really flocking to Sarah Sze’s sculpture.

But they’re shy, at least during the daytime when thousands of people are passing by, sticking camera lenses into their little wooden houses and offering good, old-fashioned New York City food critiques of their bird seed. However, once you approach the exhibit you start hearing this chorus of chirping, and if you look around in the grass and stone mulch you can see them hopping around. I caught this mourning dove today, but there were lots of sparrows too, as well as butterflies who were enjoying the fruit that has been left for them.

I marvel that there’s this habitat just outside my window and am reminded, again, at what “Keep it wild” really means.

My friend Tom says “don’t be a hater” (he has teenagers) and normally I agree but I can’t play Pollyanna any longer. I have to say it: I hate the “talking” water fountains on the High Line. The first time I bent over to take a sip of water I practically smashed my camera when the fountain barked back at me. If it quoted Shakespeare’s Cleopatra (“I dream’d there was an Emperor Antony…”) I might feel differently but this stuff is ridiculous. Honestly, what is this all about? Hydration? Really? I hope no one with a heart condition gets thirsty on the High Line.

I can’t remember a time I was critical of the High Line. Maybe I thought my encomiastic posts would last forever; that is was impossible — or at least really, really hard — to find fault with a place where they manage, day in and day out, season after season, section after section, to get things right. But we lost Stephen Vitiello’s “A Bell For Every Minute” and this is all we get in return?

I’m bringing a water bottle from now on. And I’m dreaming of winter when it’s so cold that the audio track freezes. Or the whole frackin’ fountain is just shut down. “Condemning shadows quite.”

Unlike the other dogs I’ve met in the park this one, whom I’ve seen around the neighborhood many times, is legit: she’s a service dog and is very sweet and well-behaved. Sorry she’s out of focus. I was so startled to see a dog actually walking the High Line on a leash that I was all in a swivet. Next time…

Another dog, this one a large hound, was gazing down at the High Line when I passed by this afternoon. Once I raised my camera to my eye it turned its head as if to show complete disinterest in me. I think it is quite a happy dog who gets to sit on a bed and watch the passersby.

I went to a wedding yesterday that was held in a field just a few miles from the Ashokan reservoir. The gentleman who officiated spoke of the Ashokan  — the deepest of several upstate reservoirs that provide water to New York City — as a metaphor for the reserves that each of us needs in a marriage. It’s the source we can always turn to, if we’re lucky to know that it’s there.

Of course I thought of the two bells from the Ashokan Center, a place dedicated to teaching about nature, history, farming and the arts in the Catskills, that ring every day on the High Line in Stephen Vitiello’s “A Bell For Every Minute” exhibit. The first bell rings at eleven minutes past the hour and it’s a sleigh bell. The second is the dinner bell, and it rings at thirty-nine past.

Tomorrow Vitiello’s exhibit goes silent. It’s been a great gift to visitors on the High Line, an audio map of sounds from all over New York City and slightly beyond. All that’s left to say is thanks to this artist for his wonderful sound track, and to the Friends of the High Line for making a home for it this past year.

I’m sad that Vitiello’s exhibit is coming down — for me it has been a defining part of the High Line experience — but there are a million sounds to hear in the big city and what this exhibit did was remind us to listen. There’s no more artistic narrative — 59 bells every hour, with a chorus at the end — just the noisy cacophony of this great city.

To learn more about Stephen Vitiello, visit his website here. Or check out his sound cloud here.