A Milestone Year

Twenty years ago we advocated to transform an abandoned rail line as a new public space. Ten years ago we welcomed our first visitors and became a landmark of the city. This year we’re marking these milestones not by looking back, but by looking forward to what comes next—both concretely with a year of completely new programs and initiatives, and conceptually, by imagining what could be.

Introducing: our milestone year mark

The original High Line logo was made 20 years ago by graphic designer Paula Scher. To celebrate our double anniversary, we’re updating our logo with the roman numeral X. The X honors both these decades, but it also represents a crossroads, a connection, and a meeting place. We’re at the threshold of an exciting future and we can’t wait for the new directions that lie ahead.

Below are some of the ways we’re exploring what’s next. Check back on our website and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram at @highlinenyc for updates on these upcoming programs and special events.

The Spur

The Spur was once the High Line section most in danger of demolition. Thanks to a group of committed citizens and community leaders, we celebrated its opening on June 5, 2019.

James Corner Field Operations (Project Lead), Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and planting designer Piet Oudolf—the same design team behind the first three sections of the park—listened to what visitors wanted when choosing the features for the Spur. That means: more space for public programming, more restrooms, more access points, more food, more art, and more plants.

Learn more about the Spur

The Plinth

The Plinth is the first space on the High Line—and one of the only sites in New York City—dedicated solely to a rotating series of new, monumental, contemporary art commissions. The Plinth is located on the Spur, where a large open space offers sweeping views of the city. Artworks selected for the Plinth will thus become part of the cityscape itself.

Learn more about the Plinth

Brick House

For the inaugural High Line Plinth, Simone Leigh presents Brick House, a 16-foot-tall bronze bust of a Black woman whose torso conflates the forms of a skirt and a clay house. Leigh’s magnificent Black female figure challenges visitors to think more immediately about the architecture around them, and how it reflects customs, values, priorities, and society as a whole.

Learn more about Brick House

We Are Here

Commissioned for the opening of the Spur, We Are Here presented a series of text-based sound installations that spanned several locations of the High Line. Claudia Rankine wrote the text with Garnette Cadogan, Helga Davis, and LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, with sound by Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste.

We Are Here celebrated what it means to be in relation to time, with all its pleasures of serendipity, and all the change, destruction, and renewal that accompanies the construction of modernity.

Learn more about We Are Here

New Monuments for New Cities

New Monuments for New Cities is the first project of the High Line Network Joint Art Initiative, a new collaboration between infrastructure reuse projects in North America. This public art exhibition will travel across the United States and Canada throughout 2019. For the exhibition, five urban reuse projects that are part of the High Line Network invited five of their local artists or artist groups to create proposals (in the form of posters) for new monuments. Each participating location will produce an exhibition of the resulting 25 artworks specific to their site.

The 25 artists in the exhibition were each invited to respond to the following prompt: “imagine a monument for today, for your city, for your country, for your community.

Learn more

High Line Network Symposium

The High Line Network’s 2019 symposium brought infrastructure reuse project leaders, community leaders, and academics to discuss public space reclamation and activation.

In/With Chelsea

In/With Chelsea is a new program that uses art as a means for convening, collecting, preserving, and amplifying local stories from long-time North Chelsea residents. Four commissioned artists worked with local organizations to create a series of street signs that make visible the historical and social landscape of senior residents, LGBTQ+, disabled neighbors, garment workers, and union laborers in the neighborhood.

Learn more

What’s Next? Artist and Community Imagine Futures

To commemorate our anniversaries, we invited a group of artists to mount participatory art projects every weekend of September. Starting with the provocation, “what will the High Line and the surrounding area look like in 100 years?” neighbors and visitors were invited to imagine our collective futures from vast and varied vantage points, such as the environment, politics, urban planning, intimacy, collectivity, and more.

Horticulture Celebration

Throughout the month of September we invited voices from the realms of plant medicine, urban agriculture, history, anthropology, community gardening, and local activism to lead tours on the gardens and our historical and changing relationships to them. The month culminated on September 21 with a wellness fair that included expert-led hands-on workshops, walks, talks, and more that explored the ever-changing relationship between plants and humans—on the micro-level of the High Line and the macro-level of the planet.

Learn more

Donate today

The High Line is almost entirely supported by people like you. As a nonprofit organization, we need your support to keep this public space free—and extraordinary—for everyone.

Donate

A Milestone Year

Introducing: our milestone year mark

The Spur

The Plinth

Brick House

We Are Here

New Monuments for New Cities

High Line Network Symposium

In/With Chelsea

What’s Next? Artist and Community Imagine Futures

Horticulture Celebration

Donate today

FROM THE BLOG

The Making of Brick House

Fall Guide to the High Line

New Monuments for New Cities