The High Line

This guide to The High Line in New York City opens in 1980, when the last freight train crossed this elevated track and the line went silent for two decades. Wild grasses and self-seeded trees colonized the abandoned rails thirty feet above Chelsea's streets, even as property owners lobbied through the 1980s to tear the whole structure down. Two strangers who met at a community board meeting in 1999 are at the center of what came next.