How Two Neighbors Saved the High Line — And What Came After

Almost every American city has one: a disused rail line, a vacant armory, a closed school, a crumbling pier. The default outcome is demolition, because demolition has a champion — usually the owner or the neighbors who want the eyesore gone — and preservation usually does not.

The High Line is the best-known exception in the United States. It is worth studying not because every city can build a $150 million elevated park, but because the organizing sequence that saved it is repeatable, and because the debate that followed is one every neighborhood campaign should think about in advance.

The problem: a structure everybody wanted gone

The West Side Elevated Line opened in 1934 to lift freight trains off Manhattan’s streets. Before it existed, street-level trains along Tenth Avenue had killed so many people that, as NYC Parks notes in its official history of the park, “By 1910 more than 500 pedestrians had been killed by these trains, and Tenth Avenue was known as ‘Death Avenue.’”

Trucking eventually displaced urban rail freight, and the line stopped running in 1980. What remained was a 1.45-mile steel viaduct running through the meatpacking district and West Chelsea, above warehouses and auto shops, with self-seeded grasses and wildflowers growing in the old ballast.

Property owners beneath the structure wanted it torn down; it cast shadows and limited what they could build. A preservation attempt in the early 1980s by Peter Obletz, who formed the West Side Rail Line Foundation, slowed demolition but did not stop it. Sections came down, including the stretch from Bethune to Gansevoort Streets around 1990–91. In 1999, ownership passed to CSX Transportation, which issued a request for proposals about the corridor’s reuse. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani signed a demolition order in his final days in office, according to Friends of the High Line’s own account.

Who got involved

Joshua David, a freelance writer, and Robert Hammond, who worked in business and had a background in art, met at a community board meeting about the structure in 1999. Neither was a planner, a developer, or an elected official. NYC Parks describes the moment plainly: “In 1999, as CSX issued a request for proposals to reuse the abandoned rail line, two citizens—Joshua David and Robert Hammond—enamored with its industrial beauty formed the Friends of the High Line with the intent of converting it to a public park.”

Around them, over six years, assembled:

• Neighborhood residents and artists who were drawn to the structure’s strangeness and photographed the wild landscape growing on it.
• Property owners under and beside the line, initially opposed, who became supporters once a rezoning let them transfer unused development rights elsewhere.
• City officials: the Bloomberg administration, which backed the conversion, and the City Council, which approved the West Chelsea zoning framework.
• Federal regulators: the Surface Transportation Board, whose rail-banking authority made preservation legally possible.
• Designers: James Corner Field Operations, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and planting designer Piet Oudolf.

Key takeaway: The campaign’s first achievement was not a park. It was convincing people that an “eyesore” was an asset — and that took images, events, and a plan, not just opposition.

What they did, step by step

1. Showed up to the community board meeting

The organization exists because two residents attended a routine local meeting. Community boards in New York are advisory, but they are where land-use questions surface first. Most cities have an equivalent: a neighborhood council, planning commission, or advisory committee. (See our guide to speaking at a city council meeting for how to use that opening.)

2. Made the asset visible

Almost nobody had seen the top of the High Line. Friends of the High Line commissioned and circulated photographs of the wild landscape on the viaduct, which reframed the debate from “rusting relic” to “hidden public space.” Changing the mental image of a contested site is often the highest-leverage thing a small group can do.

3. Ran an open ideas competition

In 2003, the group held an ideas competition that drew 720 submissions from more than 36 countries, and NYC Parks records that the later official design competition drew 726 proposals. The competition produced press coverage, gave supporters something concrete to imagine, and cost far less than an engineering study.

4. Found the legal path: rail banking

The decisive legal tool was federal. Under rail banking, an out-of-service corridor can be preserved for potential future rail use while serving in the interim as a trail. In June 2005 the Surface Transportation Board issued a certificate of interim trail use for the corridor, and CSX transferred ownership to New York City later that year. Without that mechanism, demolition would likely have proceeded.

5. Turned opponents into stakeholders through zoning

This is the step most often skipped in retellings. NYC Parks notes that the city approved the conversion “gaining support from formerly opposed West Chelsea property owners by up-zoning their development rights.” In practice, the 2005 West Chelsea zoning framework let owners under the viaduct sell or transfer unused development rights to nearby sites, so preserving the structure stopped costing them money.

That deal made the park possible. It also set up everything people argue about today.

6. Raised money and built in phases

The Bloomberg administration committed $50 million toward the park in 2004, and Friends of the High Line raised private funds on top of it — more than $150 million across the first phases, with roughly $35 million more for the final section. The park opened in stages: Gansevoort to West 20th Street in June 2009, the next section in 2011, the rail yards section in 2014, the Spur in June 2019, and the Moynihan Connector in June 2023.

What changed

The structure survived — the first and simplest measure of success.

A new kind of public space entered the city’s inventory. The park is owned by the City of New York under Parks jurisdiction, while Friends of the High Line “oversees the public programming, public art, maintenance, and operations,” and states that it raises “nearly 100%” of the park’s annual budget privately.

Visitors came in enormous numbers — roughly 8 million a year by 2019, with tourists making up a large majority.

West Chelsea transformed. New residential and commercial towers rose along the corridor; property values near the park climbed; the area around the northern end became the anchor for a major commercial development.

The model spread. Friends of the High Line launched the High Line Network in 2017 as a peer group for infrastructure-reuse projects; it now counts 46 projects, 31 of them open. Philadelphia’s Rail Park, Chicago’s Bloomingdale Trail (the 606), and Atlanta’s BeltLine are part of a wave that the High Line helped make fundable.

Criticisms and limits

The High Line is also the standard case study in what people call the “High Line effect”: a beloved public amenity that accelerates displacement around it.

The rezoning that saved the park also supercharged development. Transferring development rights was the price of neighborhood peace, and the result was a corridor of high-end construction. You cannot fully separate the park from the buildings.

Costs rose for people and businesses that were already there. Reporting and research collected in the High Line’s public record document sharp increases in nearby property values, with adjacent buildings appreciating substantially faster than comparable blocks, and the closure of long-established auto shops, small businesses, and other neighborhood fixtures as rents rose.

Local residents were not the primary users. A park drawing millions of tourists a year serves a different constituency than a neighborhood playground. Nearby public housing residents — in developments like Fulton Houses and Elliott-Chelsea — live a block from one of the world’s most famous parks, and much of the debate centers on whether they got any benefit from it.

The founders themselves acknowledged the shortfall. Co-founder Robert Hammond said publicly in 2017 that the project had failed the surrounding community in important ways: it had been built for the neighborhood but had not ended up serving many of the people who lived there.

Private operation raises equity questions. A park funded almost entirely by private donations depends on donors, and donor priorities are not always neighborhood priorities. It also sets a precedent that lets cities build amenities without committing public maintenance dollars — good for the balance sheet, complicated for accountability.

Counterpoints deserve a hearing too. West Chelsea was already changing before the park opened; the park preserved public access to a corridor that would otherwise have become private development; and it generated tax revenue and jobs. The honest conclusion is that the park was a powerful accelerant on a trend already underway — and that its organizers did not plan, early enough, for who would be pushed out.

Key takeaway: If your campaign will raise the value of surrounding land, anti-displacement measures are not a separate issue. They are part of the project, and the time to negotiate them is while you still have leverage.

Lessons you can use

1. Go to the meeting nobody attends. Friends of the High Line began at a community board meeting. Local land-use bodies are where decisions are still reversible.
2. Reframe the asset before you argue about policy. Photos, tours, and renderings changed the public’s picture of the High Line faster than any policy memo could have.
3. Give supporters something to imagine. An open ideas competition is cheap, generates press, and turns a vague “save it” into dozens of concrete visions.
4. Find the legal mechanism early. Rail banking, landmark designation, conservation easements, historic tax credits, and interim-use permits all exist for exactly these situations. One of them is usually the hinge your campaign turns on.
5. Convert opponents by changing their economics. Property owners under the viaduct stopped fighting when a rezoning made preservation profitable. Ask what your opponents actually need.
6. Expect the deal that wins to have consequences. The same rezoning that saved the structure reshaped the neighborhood. Write down the likely side effects before you sign on.
7. Negotiate anti-displacement protections while you have leverage. Affordable housing requirements, commercial rent supports, local hiring, and community benefit agreements are far easier to secure before approval than after ribbon-cutting.
8. Build an organization, not just a campaign. A nonprofit that can raise money, hold a maintenance contract, and outlast administrations is what let a six-year fight become a permanent institution.
9. Define who the project is for, and measure it. “Visitors” and “neighbors” are different metrics. Track both, and publish both.
10. Share what you learned. The High Line Network exists because the founders recognized other cities would face the same trade-offs — and that early advice about equity is worth more than a design manual.

What you can do next

• Identify the disused asset in your own city — a rail spur, a closed school, a vacant lot, an old firehouse — and find out who owns it and what the current plan is. The local government directory is a starting point, including the New York, NY page.
• Get on the agenda: check the town hall calendar for the next community board, planning commission, or council land-use hearing.
• Gather neighbors around the specific question of what should happen to the site by starting a debate, including the hard part — who benefits and who could be priced out.
• If you want a formal vehicle for the proposal, start an initiative and read our guide on how to start a petition.
• For background on the policy choices behind land-use fights, read zoning reform and housing affordability.