Preventing The Over Success Of The High-Line
New York’s High Line park is arguably the most widely used example for reclaiming public space. Buildings designed by star architects keep popping up around it, including Zaha Hadid’s first residential building in New York, scheduled to be completed soon. Many credit the exponential growth of the adjacent neighborhood to the “High Line effect,” while others suggest that the changes were inevitable with or without the park. Each year, High Line wannabes rush to replicate the designs and the economic development models generated by the park. What often gets overlooked is that the High Line is not just an incredibly successful design, but also has a complex management structure.
Owned by the City of New York, the High Line is a public park maintained, operated, and programmed by Friends of the High Line, in partnership with the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation. Friends of the High Line raises 98 percent of the park's annual budget. Attentive to all its visitors, it tries to make sure the High Line remains first of all a public space for locals.
Strelka alumna and senior project associate with the Project for Public SpacesAnna Siprikova talked with Robert Hammond, co-founder and executive director of Friends of the High Line and a producer of the film Citizen Jane: Battle for the City, about his attempt to kick start a network of projects that are going to transform the future of our cities.
Co-founder and executive director of Friends of the High Line. An area resident, he co-founded the nonprofit in 1999, rallying public support for the park.
– The High Line is extraordinary, not only in terms of design and its success, but in your openness to embrace diversity, inclusion, challenges, and things that you would have done differently. You have recently established the High Line Network. Can you tell me more about the goal of this project?
– We started the High Line Network because so many people came to us for advice and we were trying to figure out how to structure it. Different people with similar issues have done different things. The guy who started Bryant Park is a consultant [Dan Biederman]; you can hire him and he has advised on a lot of different projects. Central Park has a Central Park Institute where you can go and take free classes from them on how to manage large public open spaces. Lincoln Center: you can also come to them and they have started a consulting business where cities can go and hire them to figure out how to build a cultural center. But what we found is more interesting is not just learning from the High Line but learning from each other. That is why it is very specifically a network. We started it and we are leading it, but it is not just learning from the High Line; it is learning from each other, learning from the challenges and from the things we might have done differently, things that we are continuing to work on, and what we learn from them. So that was the emphasis behind it, and it has a real emphasis on social equity: these projects all have economic benefits, but what about the social benefits? So we are really trying to get people look at these issues in their beginning, in the early stages of their projects. Right now, the network is just 19 projects in America. But we are looking at expanding it within the US and also, potentially, internationally.