Peer Reviewed

Title: 110th Street Streetsape, The High Line [PLACEMARK Award: Hugh Hardy]

Journal Issue: Places, 14(2)

Author: Bressi, Todd W

Publication Date: 2001

Publication Info: Places

Permalink: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/48z9569f

Acknowledgements: This article was originally produced in Places Journal. To subscribe, visit www.places-journal.org. For reprint information, contact [email protected].

Keywords: places, placemaking, architecture, environment, landscape, urban design, public realm, planning, design, placemark, award, Hugh Hardy, Todd Bressi, street, streetscape, The High Line

Copyright Information: All rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. Contact the author or original publisher for any necessary permissions. eScholarship is not the copyright owner for deposited works. Learn more at http://www.escholarship.org/help_copyright.html#reuse

eScholarship provides open access, scholarly publishing services to the University of California and delivers a dynamic research platform to scholars worldwide. The High Line, 110th Streetscape

The power of collaborations and partnerships, successful in reviving New York City’s signature public spaces, is now being used to advocate for places with less cachet or clout.

Civic designers have helped frame broad hhpa is also working with residents of Harlem visions for American cities, certainly since the and the Cityscape Institute to provide that neigh- The 110th St. streetscape days of Frederick Law Olmsted’s park plans. borhood with a gateway to Central Park that is project helps transfer the Today civic designers not only require vision and every bit as elegant as the streetscapes that front energy from the refurbished Central Park to the adjacent foresight, as they did in Olmsted’s time, but also the park in tonier neighborhoods. For one collab- neighborhood. Graphic the capability to work with increasingly frag- orator, Betsy Barlow Rogers, now of the © Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer mented power structures and diverse constituen- Cityscape Institute and formerly of the Central cies. The work of the civic designer requires not Park Conservancy, this is a recognition that the only a long view but also articulate voice and a wondrous transformation of the park cannot stop skilled hand. at the park’s boundaries. For Hardy, it is a state- Hardy has brought all those qualities to the ment that civic streets in Harlem deserve as much civic projects on which he has collaborated in attention as squares in Midtown. hhpa’s earlier New York. He is now a member of a group of work in the neighborhood, administrative and architects who are seeking to preserve The High artistic space for the Dance Theatre of Harlem, Line, an abandoned, elevated railroad track in showed that New York’s civic, urban and artistic Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. The High spirit can be used to lift local neighborhoods as Line has long fascinated architects, planners and well as define the global city. other designers; there were first a spate of propos- als for using it as a light rail corridor and now, —Todd W. Bressi more magnificently, perhaps, as an aerial park, an aerie, much in the spirit of the Promenade Plantée in Paris.

26 PLACES14:2