nonprofits don’t like to spend money on development staff, but you need to invest in fund-raising to grow. JOSH
We had to pay Juliet a competitive salary. It was more than Robert and I were making, which felt strange. She asked about what benefits we offered; we didn’t offer any at that point. She also asked us to buy her an Aeron chair. She had one at New Yorkers for Parks. We nickel-and-dimed her about the chair, and she ultimately made a deal to buy the one she’d had at New Yorkers for Parks. Because she was leaving a good job at an established organization, we had to have a frank conversation with her. We told her there were no guarantees at the High Line. We hoped we would succeed, but she was taking a job with an organization that might be gone tomorrow.
taken a position on the High Line, and many of the members individually were fairly negative about it. But I knew the answer that everybody needed to hear was “yes,” so that is the answer I gave. It was also clear that Dan wanted our support of his larger vision in its entirety, including the stadium. That was fairly burdensome, because the stadium faced intense community opposition. Our project needed both the community and Dan to be happy, but this was not going to be easy. Dan was going to meet with Chelsea Property Owners to give them a chance to present their study. We felt pretty good about our study. Dan seemed excited about the larger vision of the project, and how it might connect with his own big vision. It felt like we had a chance.
ROBERT
In late September, we presented the economic study to Dan Doctoroff. We showed the feasibility of building a park on the High Line, how much it would cost, and the value it would generate for the City. Our estimated construction costs were for a bare-bones version of a park on the High Line, using a traditional greenway design vernacular—a simple paved walkway, bordered by planters. We thought that in the end we were likely to pursue a plan with greater design sophistication, with higher costs, but for the purposes of this study, it was important to keep cost estimates as low as possible. The presentation also laid out a simple version of the transfer of development rights mechanism that was ultimately used in the rezoning of West Chelsea, which would allow owners of property under the High Line to sell their unusable development rights above the High Line to a number of other property owners in the neighborhood. JOSH
John said no one would read the study itself, which was hundreds of pages long. What the study was good for was making a nice thunk when you dropped it on the table, after you gave your PowerPoint presentation. We had worked for weeks on the PowerPoint. Dan talked in that meeting about the mayor’s larger plans for the redevelopment of the West Side around the Olympics. This would involve a major rezoning in Hell’s Kitchen, the rezoning in Chelsea, and a stadium on the rail yards. He asked, “Do you think that the community likes the High Line enough to make them supportive of the rezoning in West Chelsea that includes it?” Robert turned to me and said, “Josh is on the community board—Josh, the community will like this, right?” At that point I didn’t know. The community board hadn’t 52
Ideas for the High Line ROBERT
We started planning for a design competition. It wasn’t going to be the kind of competition where the design that wins gets built. It couldn’t be: we didn’t have any rights, we didn’t have any money, and the High Line was still in danger of being torn down. The competition would be just for ideas—and the ideas didn’t have to be realistic, or fundable, or buildable. The competition would free people up to think about the High Line in different ways. And it would get attention. Most people still didn’t know what the High Line was, even people in the neighborhood. You’d mention the High Line and they’d go, “What?” Then you’d say, “You know, that elevated rail line,” and they still wouldn’t know. And then you’d say, “That dark thing with the pigeon droppings under it,” and then they’d go, “Oh, yeah, that thing. I hate that thing.” JOSH
There are aspects of the High Line’s progress that Robert had in his head from very early on and which he pursued with great determination. The design ideas competition was one of these. He, more than I, latched on to a high level of design as being integral to the future of the High Line. I loved architecture. I loved beautiful design. But I didn’t look at the project in as expansive terms as Robert did. I just loved the structure itself and wanted to save it. ROBERT
John Alschuler urged us not to do the ideas competition. He said, “Look, people already think you’re crazy. If you encourage people to submit ideas that are never going to happen, you’re reinforcing the idea that this is just a dream.” Gifford agreed. As I DE A S F O R T H E H I G H L I N E
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City Council speaker, he was trying to push the High Line as something that could actually happen. JOSH
We got positive feedback from Dan’s office throughout the fall, largely through Laurel Blatchford, whom we’d call from time to time; she told us that things were looking good. Finally, at the end of the year, Laurel said that the City was going to file with the Surface Transportation Board in Washington requesting a Certificate of Interim Trail Use to railbank the High Line. By doing that, they would effectively change City policy from one that favored demolishing the High Line to one that favored saving it. It was our biggest victory yet. We now had the City as a partner. Not only had it dropped its opposition to the High Line, but it had done so in a way, with its STB filing, that indicated it was going to actively pursue transformation of the High Line into a trail or park. You’d think champagne bottles would have been popping by the caseload, but that did not happen. Once again, I don’t remember much about the good news, except for the work it generated. There was another press release to turn around, and this time the City had to sign off on it, too. Then, two days later, there was a piece in the Times, by David Dunlap: “On West Side, Rail Plan Is Up and Walking.” We kept picking up the paper to read and reread it. The change was so momentous that we found it hard to adjust to at first. Of all the powers that had been aligned against the High Line, the City had seemed the greatest. Now some casual observers even thought that saving the High Line was a done deal, which it definitely was not. The State, the railroad, and the Surface Transportation Board hadn’t given their consent. And the Chelsea Property Owners still actively opposed it. There was so much that had to be done before we were assured of saving any part of the High Line. But for Robert and me, this small victory changed the way that we looked at the High Line and what it meant to our lives. Now there was a chance that it might actually happen. ROBERT
Now the Bloomberg administration fully supported the High Line, but if they’d only endorsed it and done nothing else, the project would have died. Everything about the High Line was complex, and it had to pass through so many different agencies and departments. City government is like the human body: the head, which is the Mayor’s Office, may want to do something, but the body has a number of different parts that want to go their own way. Laurel Blatchford was assigned to the High Line by Dan Doctoroff to make sure the project moved forward in a 54
coordinated, efficient way. She helped us work on all fronts: legal, planning, economic development, and funding. Mayor Bloomberg’s administration attracted a lot of people from the private sector who wanted to get things done. Dan Doctoroff, in particular, hired sharp people, like Laurel. Dan told her the High Line was a priority, but she personally also shared our passion for the project. As at so many other times in the High Line’s story, smart people were attracted to the High Line, people with the expertise to help us get the job done. JOSH
Diane von Furstenberg had hosted an event for Save Gansevoort Market at her studio space on West Twelfth Street. We hoped that she might do something similar for the High Line. We asked Florent Morellet how to set it up, and he said, “Talk to Luisella.” If you wanted to do anything with Diane, you went through Luisella Meloni. It was always fun to call her, because her melodic Italian accent made simple things feel exotic and rich. We settled on a date in January. It was going to be a winter fund-raiser, but when the City changed its policy on the High Line, we turned it into a victory celebration. The invitation showed the line of the High Line as the stem of a martini glass. Diane’s studio was in a converted stable complex on West Twelfth Street, just south of the Meatpacking District. When you walked in, you saw a dramatic staircase that came down around a small bubbling pool. There were portraits of Diane by famous artists: Andy Warhol, Francesco Clemente. Past the stairs and the pool was a big, high-ceilinged space where Diane held her fashion shows and other events. We’ve had a lot of fantastic events over the years, but this one was the first that felt like a real party, because of the City’s new policy. From the ceiling, Bronson had hung a floating table shaped like the High Line and covered in crudités and hors d’oeuvres. It was more impressive than anything you imagined a group like ours putting together. There is a photo from that night, of Robert and Diane and me—it captures the excitement of the moment. Diane is in the center, pulling back her hair in the glamorous way she has, and we’re on either side of her, somehow separate and yet together. ROBERT
We hired some new staff, all very young: Justin Rood as our office manager, and Olivia Stinson to help with the design ideas competition. We also hired Rick Little to get businesses to be on our “business map.” People assume that any preservation or community group is going to be anti-business, or anti-development, but we were pro-business. We recognized that the High Line was going to be good for businesses, and that those businesses could be I DE A S F O R T H E H I G H L I N E
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our supporters. A lot of local businesses were start-ups like us. We wanted to make a map that showed the businesses and all the other things in the neighborhood that the High Line could connect. Rick was an opera major from a liberal arts college and didn’t have relevant expertise. He was also very shy. Why would we hire the shy guy with no expertise to go sell to businesses? But Rick proved to be, along with Juliet, one of those critical early employees who not only grew in the job but also helped to define our internal ethos. He soon became our de facto office manager, finance director, and human resources manager. JOSH
The beginning of the Iraq War in March made me anxious. Justin read aloud off the computer in our Hudson Guild offices as the first bombs were falling. When Stephen and I went to the protests on the East Side, the police hemmed us all inside metal riot fences, like livestock. I’d been to many protests over the years—never had there been such restraints. I was worried that attacking Iraq would bring more anger back to United States— that George Bush had painted a fresh new target sign on New York City. I experienced a level of anxiety that sometimes made it hard for me to leave the house. My therapist gave me a prescription for these wonderful little pink pills, which helped. ROBERT
That spring we focused on the ideas competition. I had decided that I didn’t want to be spending all my time on the High Line if we weren’t going to have an incredible design. We’d been to the Promenade Plantée, in Paris, but that design doesn’t play off the unusualness of the structure: it is like that of a regular Parisian park, with rose trellises, an allée of trees, and a little water stream in the middle. I thought it would be a missed opportunity if we saved the High Line and then put a standard park up there. To run the ideas competition, we hired Reed Kroloff. He was editor of Architecture magazine and also the boyfriend of Casey Jones, the architect who’d done the Design Trust study. Reed said, “You’re not going to get big-name architects to compete, because you don’t have much of a prize, and they’re not going to waste their time on something that’s never going to happen.” We did persuade some well-known architects to be on the jury—Stephen Holl, who did a famous early project about the High Line called “Bridge of Houses”; Bernard Tschumi, head of the architecture program at Columbia; Marilyn Jordan Taylor, who was heading Skidmore, Owings and Merrill; Julie Bargmann, who’d been working on the stadium plan and was encouraging the planners to keep the High Line; and Signe Nielsen, a 56
landscape designer who’d worked on Hudson River Park. The other jurors were Murray Moss, from the design store Moss, in SoHo; Lynne Cooke, a curator at Dia Center for the Arts; Vishaan Chakrabarti, whom Amanda had hired to be director of the Manhattan office of the Department of City Planning; and Lee Compton, a community board member who lived near the High Line and was very supportive of our efforts. JOSH
In April 2003, Community Board 4 finally voted on a resolution in favor of saving the High Line. It took almost four years for us to get the vote. When we did, in a meeting at St. Luke’s– Roosevelt Hospital, it was 28 to 1. It was ultimately good that it took the board so long to get around to voting on the issue. If the resolution had come up when we first started, they might have voted us down. I was on the community board for about six years. My time there taught me how to work with large, difficult-to-manage groups that need to be carried along gently to reach one goal or another. I held a lot of one-on-one meetings with fellow board members to build goodwill for the High Line. I was lucky to get advice from other members who liked the High Line, such as Joe Restuccia, a developer of affordable housing in Hell’s Kitchen, and Lee Compton, a Chelsea resident who went on to become Board 4’s chair. I slept well the night the community board voted in favor of the High Line. I still see the one woman who voted “no” in the neighborhood and at public meetings. We’re friendly—sometimes we even agree on things—but she always speaks to me in a slightly sarcastic way, as if to say, I’ve got your number, you can’t fool me. ROBERT
The first entry to arrive for the ideas competition was drawn as a cartoon. It turned the High Line into a Mother Hubbard theme park, with the stairs built into a giant shoe. No other entries came in for a while after that. We were worried. We had done all this work for the competition, and we were going to end up with just this fairytale theme park. In the end we received 720 entries from thirty-six countries. We had asked for the entries to be submitted on boards, because we didn’t have the resources to mount them ourselves. With 720 of them, it was too much for our tiny office at Hudson Guild. We had to move them to an empty office space in the Starrett-Lehigh Building, which was lent to us by one of our supporters. A few famous firms entered, including Polshek Partnership, the Hariri sisters, and 2x4, Michael Rock’s graphic design firm. But most of the entries were from students and ordinary people. We had an entry that came from Iran—they had to ship I DE A S F O R T H E H I G H L I N E
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it to Paris first and then have someone ship it from Paris to New York because you couldn’t mail things here directly from Tehran after 9/11. An entry came from Russia that showed the High Line as a lizard, done in the style of an icon with gold paint. We had political manifestos—one submission had really strong black-and-white graphics and was called “Park Prison Pool.” If you were going to imprison people, the proposal went, the public should have to see the prisoners, so they proposed building a prison within the I-beams of the High Line that you could look into while you were walking in the park; underneath, there would be a pool. I had two favorites. An architecture student from Austria, Nathalie Rinne, proposed making the High Line into a mile-anda-half-long swimming pool. The image of a lap pool running right through Manhattan was very beautiful. Another idea was from Front Studio, the firm of Yen Ha and Ostap Rudakevych, the two young architects who had designed our office space at Hudson Guild. They proposed leaving the landscape intact, as in the Joel Sternfeld photos, and putting a roller coaster on the Line. You’d be zooming up, looking into someone’s apartment, zipping down, and doing flips over the city streets. These were not realistic ideas, but they made people think about the High Line in new ways. The strongest common thread running through the entries was an appreciation for the existing landscape. People loved what was up there already. Of the four finalists, none was realistic. One was called “Black Market Crawler.” It talked about preserving the dark side of the High Line, and it pictured a woman shooting up in her leg. I was worried about what Gifford would think of that one. We wanted to exhibit the entries in a high-profile location. I had fallen in love with Vanderbilt Hall in Grand Central Terminal. For a corporate event there, it cost almost $100,000 a day, but as a nonprofit we were able to cut a deal with them to have the exhibit for two weeks in the summer for $30,000. It’s complicated to do installations in Vanderbilt Hall. It sits over the Guastavino arches of the Oyster Bar, so you cannot have a heavy weight-load bearing down on any single point—you have to spread the weight out over a large footprint. Then there is the marble floor to worry about. And it’s all under the MTA’s jurisdiction, so there were many security issues. We would have only two days to install. It’s such a big room, and we worried that the competition boards would be dwarfed by it. A quarter million people walk through that space each day. What was going to make them stop for our competition? To help us figure out a solution, we met with LOT-EK, a small architecture firm with offices near the High Line. They were among the first architects to use shipping 58
containers to create architectural forms; they had designed the Bohen Foundation, on West Thirteenth Street. At LOT-EK, Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano planned a large structure to house the exhibition. The front would be a movie theater-like video installation that faced onto the central path through Vanderbilt Hall. The scale of it, and the flickering images, would draw people in. On both sides would be huge vinyl panels that Paula Scher at Pentagram would design for us, blowing up Joel Sternfeld’s images to billboard proportions. We would mount the finalists’ competition boards under these and display more of the entries inside the structure, behind the video screen, several hundred in all. The video was essential. It would capture people’s attention and explain what the High Line was. A friend of mine, Jim Hitchcock, put me in touch with John Zieman, who produced and directed commercials and music videos. John made a great video for us. He interviewed key people and also got some great footage up on the High Line. The video really captured the spirit of what we were trying to do. We decided to hold our summer benefit on the opening night of the exhibition: a cocktail party for a thousand people, followed by dinner for three hundred. It was so big because we invited everybody who entered the competition to come to the cocktail party for free. This was a huge undertaking for our small staff and for Josh and me. We got into our first really big fight about it. JOSH
The ideas competition was something Robert had always wanted to do, and he drove it very hard, as he often does. It was a big lift for us, especially the exhibition at Grand Central. I was not convinced that we had to make design so central to our mission. I just wanted to save the High Line and open it to the public. Robert’s perspective was, “It can’t be a park like other parks. If it’s like other parks, we’ve failed.” That felt arrogant to me, more than I had signed on for. The strain of producing the competition and the exhibition brought things to a head. There was the mad rush to get the competition papers together and launch the competition on the website. There was the physical demand of dealing with the entries that were arriving—each entry was 30 inches by 40 inches, and there were 720 of them. All the boards—there were mountains of them—had to be moved from our office to storage at Starrett-Lehigh, then to the jury site, then back to Starrett-Lehigh again, and then to Grand Central. Then there was the construction of the exhibition structure. At every stage of the process, everything was so last-minute. If you walked into Vanderbilt Hall twenty-four hours before the opening, you would have said there is no way this is going to happen. I DE A S F O R T H E H I G H L I N E
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We were both doing our other jobs, too, and we were exhausted. I often had to get up at four in the morning to write all the letters, press releases, and e-mail newsletters that were needed for the High Line. People would say, “Why are you e-mailing me at four in the morning?” I’d been planning for a year to travel with Stephen in Sicily for my fortieth birthday and our twentieth anniversary, and the competition jury ended up being scheduled at the same time. I resented that Robert had scheduled it then, and Robert resented that I stuck to my travel plans and left him to do the jury alone. When I came back from my trip, we met at Starrett-Lehigh to decide which boards would be included in the exhibition. The room had something wrong with it. There was dust in there, or maybe it was the glue from the boards, but if you spent more than half an hour there, you got a splitting headache and felt dizzy. Our fight started about individual boards, but it ended up being about everything. ROBERT
We had to do our selections quickly, because I had an important meeting at Grand Central to get to. And there we were, fighting, with all these fumes and stacks of 720 competition boards. I had to leave for my meeting, and I was still upset. Josh was considerate enough to offer me a sedative. I don’t think I’d ever taken a sedative before. But I took the little pink pill, and it helped. I thought of it as a peace offering. For better or for worse, the exhibition was an example of how we function as an organization. We often commit to more than seems prudent. Someone once told me that Friends of the High Line functions more like a political campaign than a nonprofit, mobilizing a lot of people to get behind something in very little time. JOSH
We survived, and the exhibition did get finished in time. The star of opening night was Gifford Miller. He stood up on the podium in front of those one thousand people at the benefit cocktail party and announced that the City Council was making a $15.75 million allocation to the High Line, money that could be used to build the park, eventually. It was our greatest advance of the year, coming just six months after the new City policy. Vanderbilt Hall is a terrific place to announce something good in, because of the acoustics—when people cheer, it sounds amazing. That Council allocation created a sense of inevitability about the High Line, long before we won any of the approvals necessary to actually take it forward. We didn’t have the Certificate of Interim Trail Use from the STB. The property 60
owners were still challenging us in court. But we had $15.75 million for construction. ROBERT
We had distributed comment cards to those assembled at the Grand Central exhibition. On my favorite one, the commenter wrote, “The High Line should be preserved, untouched, as a wilderness area. No doubt you will ruin it. So it goes.” I tacked that above my desk. It spoke to my biggest fear: I loved what it was like up there, as it was. I was afraid that no matter what we designed, it would lose that magic. Until the day we opened, I was secretly scared that we were going to ruin it. JOSH
Edward Norton, Robert Caro, Edie Falco, and Justin Theroux were at the benefit. I was excited that Kitty Carlisle Hart and Patty Hearst came, too. To me, Kitty and Patty represented two kinds of royalty. Kitty, at ninety-two, was a legend of the theater and of New York itself. How many times had I seen her face in the party pages, and now she was at our party, brought by Randy Bourscheidt, a friend of Robert’s. And Patty’s story had imprinted itself on me when I was a boy in Brookline, Massachusetts. I had been mesmerized by her phone calls from captivity, which played on the AM radio of our brown Plymouth Valiant. She was represented as an actress by the talent agency Stephen worked for, and Stephen had helped me invite her to the benefit. At Grand Central, Kitty and Patty told us they wanted to see the High Line for themselves. Randy took us aside and told us that if we wanted Kitty to come, we would have to send a car for her. We still had very little money, so it seemed crazy to be hiring cars, but Kitty was Kitty, and so, a few days later, we sent a black car to bring her to the Thirty-fourth Street gate. She stepped out, perfectly coiffed, wearing a snug red dress and shiny black high heels. We helped her up the gravel embankment and onto the tracks. That was far enough for her. She looked all around, smiling into the sun, and said, “Isn’t this marvelous! I hope you’ll work fast, because I want to sing at your opening.” And then the black car took her away. Patty Hearst came with her daughter Gillian. Because of 9/11, security around the rail yards had been stepped up, and even though our tours were sanctioned by the railroad, sometimes three or four police officers would chase after us up there. We were about halfway around the rail yards section when the police came running at us from Thirty-fourth Street. Patty cried out, “I’m going to get arrested!” Her tone was like “Isn’t this fun?” It was one of my favorite High Line tours. Gillian has been a supporter ever since; she works on the committee of every benefit we do. I DE A S F O R T H E H I G H L I N E
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