he New York City High Line railroad, originally built as convenient transportation for warehouses along the West Side, nowadays has become many different things, none of which have anything to do with transportation. First and foremost it will become a nearly three mile long park, but it’s also a political tool, an ‘anything is possible’ dogma, a hip new area of the city, and a billion-dollar opportunity for real estate developers.

The elevated railway, which stretches all the way from Ganesvoort Street north to 34th Street, was originally built to replace the earlier train route that dangerously ran right through Tenth Avenue (or, as it was aptly nicknamed at the time, “Death Avenue”). The project cost nearly $150 million (more than $2 billion in today's dollars), but not a single train has crossed the tracks since 1980. Since then, the railway has been abandoned, left alone to deteriorate and grow weeds.

That is, until neighborhood residents Robert Hammond and Joshua David grasped the High Line’s unlimited potential. In 1999 they started a community-based organization called Friends of the High Line, united by lofty ambitions: to turn the High Line into a nearly three-mile public park in the sky.

In the near-decade that’s passed since then, so much sanguine hype has surrounded the initiative that it might be hard to believe that the proposal was not originally met with much consideration. Friends of the High Line were a group of ordinary citizens and so they had little-to-no influence in relation to the government officials and railroad company executives who controlled the High Line’s fate.

Hammond’s and David’s voices were a mere buzzing in the ear of the near-consensus of Conrail, local property owners, and the city, all of whom considered the High Line little more than an expensive nuisance. Even his holiness himself, former mayor Giuliani, signed an agreement in 2001, joining the movement towards demolishment.