ARTE.TV – ON DEMAND – DOCUMENTARY
After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the future of the High Line industrial wasteland, the remains of an elevated railway track whose wagons, which ran there until 1980, served the warehouses of brick building in the slaughterhouse district of New York, a few blocks from the destroyed World Trade Center.
Moreover, at the end of his mandate, Rudolph Giuliani, the mayor “Mr. Clean” of the city between 1994 and 2001, voted for its demolition, a decision opposed by the association founded by two residents of the district who managed to do so. retoke. The city council and the new mayor, Michael Bloomberg, opt for an associative urban park project, inspired by the Parisian Promenade plantée, known as the “Coulée verte René-Dumont”, in the 12e arrondissement.
The High Line was built between 2006 and 2009, when the first section of this route of some 2.3 km opened, between Gansevoort Street and the 34e Street. This prodigious and inventive rehabilitation, which manages to preserve the industrial aesthetic of the district and the plants which had developed there, becomes one of the places of breathing of New York, as shown in this issue of the series of “Astonishing gardens », Proposed this summer by Arte.
Strong nostalgia
But since the filming of this documentary in 2017 and its first broadcast in 2018, new buildings have multiplied around. So that the “Perspective on the city of New York” that still boasts High Line website, on the Hudson and on the industrial buildings and architects of the district (for example the iceberg with blue reflections built in 2007 for IAC / InterActiveCorp by Frank Gehry), is today largely obscured.
The new Hudson Yards district has transformed the narrow but once airy and unobstructed High Line promenade into a kind of bottleneck flowing in the oppressive shadow of these tall, towering luxury buildings – whose apartment prices have risen to soared (6 million euros on average), as much as the number of floors.
The only part of the High Line still uncovered and which retains the poetry exuding photos by photographer Joel Sternfeld, made before the rehabilitation, is that which bypasses and overhangs the rail tracks of a marshalling yard, in the west of this new residential and business district, and shortly before one of the ends of the route. But for how long?
A more recent Arte documentary, New York, metropolis of the arts (2019), by Michael Trabitzsch, seemed to pronounce the funeral prayer of this neighborhood which was that of the workshops of young painters and the bohemian counterculture (depicted for example by the Nelson Sullivan’s videos). Because they had to pack up at the same time as the Shed, a very official and richly endowed multimedia cultural complex.
So that we are seized with a strong nostalgia by reviewing these images shot for “Astonishing gardens”, which show a High Line which was not yet the victim of a success which no one, at its beginnings, had envisaged. the extraordinary amplitude. However, there remains the beautiful garden of wild herbs and wild plants cleverly domesticated by the Dutch landscape designer Piet Oudolf.
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