New York’s High Line Park stories

In case you haven’t heard the hype, New York City had an abandoned, above-ground train track running from the Meatpacking District to Hell’s Kitchen. The historical track (authroized back in 1847) was going to be torn down, until some smart folks figured out how to save it: Make it a park.

The last train ran the track in the 1980s. A Chelsea resident and railroad enthusiast Peter Obletz worked hard to get the trains up and running again (in vain, but he was in part responsible for keeping the tracks from being torn down), but it was a group called Friends of the High Line, started by Joshua David and Robert Hammond in 1999, which finally found a way to save the High Line tracks for good. All they had to do was convince the city to make it into a protected park. They conducted a study in 2002 which proved that “New tax revenues created by the public space will be greater than the costs of construction.” Bingo!

One thing led to another, and then in 2003, a big Designing the High Line competition was held to figure out how to make the best use of the tracks. The winning design came from by James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Their orginal designs were displayed at MoMa in 2005, and you can view the final designs here.

Completion is finally underway, and the first section, running from Gansevoort Street to 20th Street, opened last month to the public! What’s it like? Well, it’s certainly unlike any park I’ve ever visited. But why listen to me yammer on about it when you can listen to Kevin Bacon, Diane Von Furstenberg and Ethan Hawke?

The Sundance Channel, as part of their “Online Only Orignal Content” series, has a collection of videos of public figures talking about the High Line called High Line Stories. You can watch Kevin’s commentary above, and click here to see the rest.

Gun-friendly national parks possibly coming soon

I’ve been in national parks from Acadia in Maine to Glacier in Montana to Zion in Utah to the Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina. (You can start humming “This Land is Your Land” if you like.) I’ve always felt safe–aggravated sometimes by over-sized RVs, but safe.

I even felt safe when I was hiking in Glacier with my husband, then boyfriend, when we saw a mother grizzly bear and her cub in the distance. We were far enough away from them that they looked like dogs. Even when my husband, then boyfriend, said, “All I have to do is out run you if they come for us,” I felt safe.

Evidently, I may not have been as safe as I thought. If I had had a gun, I’d feel safer. That’s the general idea of the proposal that is on the table to allow guns in the national park system. The people who think this is a good idea must have seen the “The River Wild’ several times over. That’s the flick when Meryl Streep‘s character takes on Kevin Bacon’s character–the bad guy, during a family raft trip down a river in some western state. It was filmed in Montana and Oregon.

There are people that think this idea is about as dumb as they come. According the this article in The New York Times, The national parks are supposed to be family-friendly. Family-friendly places don’t have guns. Look at this picture taken in Yosemite by James Gordon. Is there any place that looks more family-friendly than that? Plus, there is a chance someone feeling threatened might kill an animal when there isn’t a threat at all.

Personally, I’m on the side of folks who aren’t happy with the idea of guns in national parks. I’m a fairly calm person, but I know what it feels like to not find a parking space because some large vehicle pulling another large vehicle is taking up more than one space–or what it’s like to not be able to get around a large vehicle pulling another large vehicle on a windy road. Add summer heat, limited vacation time and you have to pee, but can’t stop because there’s no room to pull over, and you’ve got trouble. “Road Rage at the Grand Canyon” coming to a theater near you.