The High Line: The wild, wild West Side, cowboys included, inspires an elevated railroad and a remarkable park

Joel Sternfeld's extraordinary four-seasons photographs of the High Line -- displayed in his 2002 show Walking The High Line -- revealed a ribbon of nature surrounded by urbanity and presented a peek into forgotten history. These images greatly influenced the later design of the park, a mix of seamless design and tastefully untethered flora. Courtesy Joel Sternfeld

PODCAST  The High Line, which snakes up New York's west side, is an ambitious park project refitting abandoned elevated train lines into a breathtaking contemporary park. This is the remnant of a raised freight-delivery track system that supported New York's thriving meat, produce and refrigeration industries that have defined the city's western edges.

 You can trace the footprints of this area back almost 200 years, to the introduction of the Hudson River Railroad and Cornelius Vanderbilt, who transformed the streets along the Hudson River into 'the lifeline of New York', filled with warehouses, marketplaces and abattoirs. And, of course, lots of traffic, turning 10th Avenue and 11th Avenue into 'death avenues', requiring New York's first 'urban cowboys'.  The West Side Elevated Freight Railroad was meant to relieve some of trauma on the street. That's not exactly how it worked out.

We'll tell you about its downfall, its transformation during the 70s as a haven for counter-culture, and its reinterpretation as an innovative urban playground.

FEATURING: Cows, dining cars, Russian caviar and sex clubs!

You can tune into it below, download it for FREE from iTunes or other podcasting services, or get it straight from our satellite site.

Or listen to it here:
The Bowery Boys: The High Line

More photos will be available later this afternoon. Notes, corrections, clarifications, sources, and additional information will be posted on Tuesday. 


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St. John's Freight Depot, built in 1871. The Cornelius Vanderbilt statue stood watch over the bustling activity until the building was demolished in the 1930s. Mr. Vanderbilt was then moved to Grand Central Terminal, where he still stands today. Pictures courtesy NYPL digital images

The businesses, the trains and the marketplaces of the west side created a nightmare traffic situation along 10th and 11th Avenues, resulting in dozens of death and the sinister moniker 'Death Avenue'. (Picture courtesy Friends of the High Line)

Rangers of Eleventh Avenue: A railroad cowboy marches ahead of an approaching train. Below that, many years later, another cowboy has his work cut out for him going up the avenue in 1922, the era of automobiles.

The relatively 'modern' St. Johns Terminal on Spring Street.

Building the elevated freight railroad: At Gansevoort Street, looking north. Picture courtesy the New York Historical Society

The elevated in 1934, West Street and Spring Street. This was one of the sections that was later ripped down. (Courtesy NYPL)

After the elevated railroad closed for good in 1980, the track sat abandoned, covered in natural overgrowth of the likes hardly seen anywhere else in Manhattan. 'Urban explorers' often traipsed along the mysterious rails, capturing the dichotomy between sudden natural landscape and metropolitan backdrop. (Photo courtesy wally g/Flickr)

The High Line Park opened in 2009, after almost a decade of awareness and fundraising. The linear park has helped transform the neighborhoods below it and has created a new must-see destination for tourists. (Courtesy Friends of the High Line)

This woman's work: Exhausting images of Astor Place and Lafayette Street

Gritty streets, circa 1912. Looking up Lafayette Street, below Astor Place. "The breaking point. A heavy load for an old woman." The building to the right is the DeVinne Press Building, built in the 1880s, and today home to Astor Center Wine & Spirits. In the distance: the Wanamaker Department Store building, today the home to K-Mart! Look here and turn the angle north for the present view of this street. [Source: LOC]



Lewis Hine hit the streets of New York in 1912 looking for dirt. And he found it. The teacher-turned-social activist and photographer had found the camera a useful tool in illustrating poverty and had already drawn attention to deplorable child labor conditions. In the wake of early social crusaders like Jacob Riis, Hine's photos helped the poorest New Yorkers by showcasing their daily toil in a landscape of decrepit quality.

Beyond the social commentary, however, these are still fascinating portraits of New York. None are more striking to me personally than his images taken one hundred years ago this month from Astor Place and along Lafayette Street. Many New Yorkers marveled that month at the exploits of daredevil pilot Frank Coffyn over New York harbor, but after the fun was over, many came home to this.

A highly energetic crossroads today, the destination of college students, shoppers, and theater goers, Astor Place has clearly cleaned up its act since Hine sat his tripod here a century ago. With these particular images, Hines was specifically commenting on 'home-work', poor women and children taking raw materials or clothing to mend back to their tenements, turning their confined living quarters into personal sweatshops.

They say other things to us today. The street conditions speak for themselves. But see if you can identify some of these street corners!

Caption "Woman crossing Astor Place with home-work": Looking up Fourth Avenue, with the Wanamaker department store building (designed by the great Daniel Burnham in 1904) to the left.

Two pictures on the same street corner. Notice the condition of the street in the background. The shop sign advertises 'Choice Fruits, Candies, Cigarettes, Hot Frankfurters'. They also have a public AT&T telephone.

I find this one the most intriguing. "Young girl carrying bundle of coats home to be finished." She's clearly walking up (or down?) along the Third Avenue elevated train. Keep in mind, in context to last week's post on the Coffyn flight, that it's so cold in New York at this time that the East River has frozen over in many places.

Pictures courtesy of the Library of Congress. You can check out their digital archives for hundreds of other Hine photographs from this era.

Notes from the podcast (#131) The First Apartment Building

The Stuyvesant Apartments in 1934, already being dwarfed with a newer structure on the right. Please note the ornate entrance to the Third Avenue elevated train to the left of the picture, as well as the streetcar tracks, no longer in use along East 18th Street in 1934, running down the cobblestone street. And I'm fairly sure that's a taxicab in the foreground.

Here are some notes on podcast #131: The First Apartment Building. To listen to the show, download it from iTunes or from here. And for those who have listened, thanks for making it one of iTunes top three individual programs in the travel/places podcasts section this weekend!

The Distinction of the 'First'
How did the Stuyvesant Apartment become known as the true 'first' apartment? After all, it's not like there was a banner over the door proclaiming "Welcome to the first apartment building ever! Come inside!" Urban dwellings were being developed of all shapes and sizes. As I mentioned, there's not much that technically separates a tenement from an apartment, if you subtract social class and building amenities. There were indeed 'fancy' tenements. Some of those buildings are still around today and serve as rather lovely renovated apartments.

Author Elizabeth Collins Cromley (more on her later) suggests there were a couple other buildings in New York City that could have held this title built earlier, including another that Richard Morris Hunt built on Wooster Street. Those candidates, however, were smaller and less profitable. (One was even refashioned as a hotel.) The Stuyvesant was ambitious in size, glorious in architecture and glittering in its notable residents.

Below: Original drawings of the Stuyvesant Apartments, done by the Historic American Buildings Survey, courtesy Library of Congress

The Other Stuyvesant?
The research for this show became trickier once I realized there was another apartment building that was sometimes referred to the Stuyvesant just a few blocks away, and some scholars have confused the two in their research. For instance, I was quite excited to learn that Clara Clemens, the daughter of Mark Twain, lived at the Stuyvesant until I realized it was most likely the other Stuyvesant. (This author erroneously combines the two structures.)

The second building is right off of Stuyvesant Square, originally addressed 17 Livingston Place. That street no longer exists. Or to quote the wonderful Old Streets blog:  "On December 3, 1953, in one of the goofier acts of the City Council, it changed the name of Livingston Place (on the east side of Stuyvesant Square) to Nathan D. Perlman Place and simultaneously--perhaps to mollify any offended Livingston descendants--changed the name of Birmingham Street to Livingston Place. The compensation was short-lived. The new Livingston Place was demapped in 1962."

That building at 17 Livingston Place (valued at drastically less than the Stuyvesant) was apparently demolished too; Beth Israel Medical Center facilities have taken up that side of the square since the late 1910s.

That Stuyvesant Name!
The apartment structure was constructed on old Stuyvesant property. Check out this map of the borders of Stuyvesant farm, which consumes much of today's East Village and the area dominated by Stuyvesant Town/Peter Cooper Village.

Rutherford Stuyvesant, creator of this luxury apartment, died in Paris, on July 4, 1909. His first wife, a member of the influential Brooklyn clan the Pierreponts, died a few years after the construction of the Stuyvesant Apartments. In 1902 Rutherford took a second wife whose name certainly equaled his own in terms of drama -- the Countess Mathilde Elizabeth de Wassanaer [More bio details here]

Stuyvesant built a lavish mansion near Allamuchy, New Jersey called Tranquility Farms, populating the surrounding land with imported trees and animals. The mansion was consumed in fire in 1959. Although the ruins were demolished, many other ancient buildings on the property remain intact. Rusty Tagliareni has taken some fascinating, haunting photos earlier this year of the ruined area. Take a gander here.

Below: Inside the lobby of the Stuyvesant, circa 1934.

For further reading
There's a great many books on the history of New York real estate. Definitely invaluable to me this time was Elizabeth Collins Cromley's 'Alone Together: A History of New York's Early Apartments' and also Steven Gaines' 'The Sky's The Limit'. I learned about the inestimable Mrs. Custer from Shirley A. Leckie's book 'Elizabeth Bacon Custer and the Making of a Myth.'

Photos above courtesy the Library of Congress