That is part of the appeal of the weirdly beautiful High Line. Not the manicured park, with its concrete boardwalk and hordes of tourists but what came before on the 1.5-miles railroad trestle, the despoiled beauty of Mother Nature set loose in the wilds of Chelsea, undisturbed for decades but for the occasional trespasser.

More than 10 million visitors have taken in the breathtaking views of the city’s skyline and the Hudson River and traipsed through its minimalist landscape of historic tracks and native grasses since the High Line park opened in 2009. It has encouraged development in Chelsea and Meatpacking, inspired artists and filmmakers, and managed to polarize the surrounding neighborhood before it has even been fully restored.

Yet the thin strip of pre-post-industrial wildlands that made that all possible is about to disappear.

The feeling was inescapable during a bittersweet walk on the overgrown final half-miled of the trestle last weekend, one of the last chances New Yorkers got to visit the final untended piece of the High Line before it is recast along with its burnished siblings.

About 800 fortunate people traipsed through the half-mile stretch encircling Hudson Yards last weekend in an event organized by Open House New York and Friends of the High Line and sponsored by the Japanese retailer, UNIQLO. Tours continue this coming weekend, though they are totally booked up.

A better sponsor would have been Timberland boots.

The path begins on West 34th Street, next to the last set of idling Megabuses bound for Pittsburgh and Toronto. It unfolds through an arc of unpruned apple trees and Oriental bittersweet before curving gently toward 12th Avenue. It kinks again at 30th Street, running out to the spur that may someday become a theater at the base of great office towers. The renovated High Line, and the reality of New York, reemerge here.

The skyline, river, plant life and rail line all compete for your attention, forcing visitors to slow down to fully appreciate the park. This is a space for ambling.

It’s a nice problem to have.

“They did a beautiful job with this,” said Ellen Appleby, who made the pilgrimage on Sunday. “It’s not an English rose garden or a formal French garden. They kept the informal feel of all these weeds and created a wonderful place.”

Everywhere granite and quartz ballast stones are scattered about the tracks. Railroad spikes jut unevenly from weathered, garnet-colored rails. Deteriorated wooden ties bend and give under the weight of footsteps. Patches of wildflowers, native grasses, and peach trees that germinated on the rail beds are so thick they are nearly impenetrable.

The new plans for the third section call for retaining much of this wilderness, but it will no doubt bear the mark of the manicured.

Students of history can see remnants of the country’s post-industrial might.
The oldest section of the grounds was built in the 1930s and contains metal railroad parts emblazoned with the names of northeast steel companies. A hydraulic switch with is patent number clearly visible at the park’s 30th Street entrance was made by Racor, the Ramapo-Ajax Corp, a Hillburn, NY company near the Ramapo Mountains also known as the Ramapo Foundry Company.

A railroad frog, those junctions allowing trains to switch tracks, bears the handiwork of the Bethlehem Steel, the country’s second-largest steel company, which built ships for the U.S. armed forces and the steel used in the Golden Gate Bridge. Other rail parts have the name “Lackawana,” an Erie County steel company that became a Bethlehem subsidiary in 1922.

But other manufacturer parts that litter the High Line trail have more unusual origins.

Caramel colored ceramic insulators with no markings on them can be found above 31st Street. And several steel plates securing wooden planks on the rails contain a jumble of numbers perhaps indicating their date of origin or some other code.
Perhaps even more mysterious is the growth of a variety of native and non-native plant species along the inhospitable terrain.

Even when it comes to our invasive flora, New York is a magnet for immigrants.
Volunteers have identified dozens of flowers, grasses, and trees that have taken root since the trains stopped running on the line more than three decades ago.

On the path above 12th Avenue grow peach and crabapple trees, elegant branches of Frost Aster, dormant stalks of Queen Anne’s lace, fading yellow goldenrod, spiky white Thoroughwort, purple Centaurea or thistle, and a handsome Juniper bush. Friends of the High Line are well known for their creative fundraising efforts--Diane Von Furstenburg has made numerous collaborations--so perhaps a High line gin is in order.

Photographer Rick Darke, who was cataloguing the season’s growth, hoped that New Yorkers would equally welcome native and non-native plants growing on the High Line. “Invasive is a pejorative term, it should be really called hyperadapted natives from other places,” he said. “Some of these species have been in New York for over 300 years. How do you determine what makes a native New Yorker?”

Still, the tour evoked mixed feeling, as New Yorkers witnessed the last time the High Line will ever look this uncultivated. City officials already broke ground on the third leg of the park last month. Construction on its $90 million refurbishment will begin later this fall and the first phase of the new space will be open by 2014.

Landscape architect James Corner Field Operations and designers Diller Scofidio + Renfro will remove the rail spikes and wooden boards, and add scores of concrete planks creating a smooth pathway for people to stroll and linger. Planting designer Piet Oudolf will preserve many of the wild grasses and flowers above the rail yards, but he can’t save everything.

For access, we are paying the price.

The cost of creating a New York space for millions to enjoy is sacrificing a portion of the unkempt splendor that drew its early admirers to the site in the first place.
But perhaps that’s the way with all New York institutions. The elevated track could have been scrapped entirely and its preservation remains a great victory for the public.

“This is a wild garden that has survived without any chemicals or irrigation,” said Darke. “This is the most sustainable garden in New York. It is a triumph.” The current High Line costs millions of dollars a year to maintain, an amount Friends of the High Line has struggled to raise on a consistent basis.

When the park is finished, it will no doubt be a triumph, too, the kind of transformation the city has not known since Central Park. But we can still acknowledge the beauty that was there before, before it is gone for good.

Change on the tracks. (Ed Reed/Mayor's Office)

The High Line. Rejuvenator of neighborhoods, destroyer of neighborhoods.

Those are basically the two media narratives surrounding the elevated park on Manhattan's West Side, which just held the groundbreaking for its third and final phase today. Most of the attention in the past has been on how great the design-y new park is, but as locals learn to live with the millions of visitors who flock to the park each year, some of them have started to complain, most notably in the Op-Ed pages of the Times, that the High Line has actually ruined, or at least Disneyfied, the neighborhoods surrounding it.

Asked about these changes today, Mayor Bloomberg did not necessarily disagree with the situation, just the sentiment.

"Cities that don’t change—if we didn’t change, Central Park would still be a shantytown; if we didn’t embrace new technology or medicines, life expectancies would still be 25 years old," the mayor said. He then recounted what sounded like a favorite New Yorker cartoon where two cavemen discuss their wonderful lives but limited lifespan. He was not calling Chelsea long-timers troglodytes, we think, but underscoring the need for change.

Creating more park space, whatever its outcome, is not the only issue, either.

"Cities have to evolve," the mayor continued. "We have a constant influx of people from around the world moving to this city, and the needs of the people who are here change. Today people are staying because the schools are better. Today we have a challenge because we need to provide more activities for more kids than we used to have. People from around the world want to come here. There’s always a challenge how you have enough affordable housing, how you build housing when the marketplace says it’s more and more valuable because more and more people want to come."

After all, this is New York. "We’re going to keep changing, and that’s what’s great about New York," the mayor concluded.

Joshua David, one of the High Line's co-founders, went further, arguing the High Line may even be a victim of its own success.

"I also think the High Line gets too much credit and blame for the changes in the neighborhood," he explained. "The Meatpacking was the Meatpacking way before the High Line. These condos, these developments were coming to Cheslea with or without the High Line. What you do have is a free, public, open park. And despite the changes, this is a strong reminder of the neighborhood’s industrial past."

"It’s hard to think we would be better off without it. You’d still have the new development, you’d still have the new changes, you just wouldn’t have the new public open space."

Do the setback! (Studios Architecture)

The earlier 10th Avenue addition, sans setback. (Studios Architecture)

Much of the debate around the expansion of the Chelsea Market has centered around not the former Nasbisco factory turned popular shopping center (and subsequent tourist attraction), but the old railroad trestle next to it.

Part of the justification for expanding the market by 25 percent was that, in addition to providing construction jobs and new office space for the city's booming tech sector, the developer of the project, Jamestown Properties, would pay about $19 million to the High Line, to help fund ongoing maintenance. But there was also great community outcry over the fact that much of the new addition would be built on the 10th Avenue side of Chelsea Market, directly overhanging the High Line.

Earlier today, the City Planning Commission unanimously approved the project's expansion, and addressed a few of these concerns. The 10th Avenue addition will now be set back from the High Line, stepping back like a wedding cake as it rises, providing more air and light over the elevated park.

But the agreement was not a total victory for the Friends of the High Line, who are desperate for funds to keep the expensive park in shape. As a salve to community concerns about affordable housing, roughly one-third of the $19 million Jamestown had promised to the park will go instead into an affordable housing fund, which can be spent on projects in the neighborhood.

"We are gratified by the City Planning Commission's thoughtful and balanced approach in consideration and approval of Jamestown's application to expand the Chelsea Market," Michael Phillips, Jamestown's COO and project manager on the expansion, said in a statement. "With the leadership of Commission Chair Amanda Burden, the commission has modified the application to allow for some of the funds generated through a zoning bonus to be used for affordable housing, an approach that follows the road map set forth by the community board."

The board tentatively approved the project earlier this summer, raising questions about its size and a lack of affordable housing. They also fought against the possible inclusion of a hotel in an expansion planned over Budakkan on the Ninth Avenue side of the project, a concern echoed by Borough President Scott Stringer when he voted against the Chelsea Market expansion in July. He also lobbied for the project to be moved away from the High Line, though he preferred moving all of it to Ninth Avenue.

The Ninth Avenue addition, which had once been taller and included a hotel. (Studios Architecture)

As part of the agreement to win approval from the commission, Jamestown agreed to remove a hotel from its plans. It also reduced the height of the Ninth Avenue addition. That piece will now rise to 135 feet, even with the neighboring roofline of the market, rather than to a height of 160 feet.

As for the setbacks on 10th Avenue, they begin at the top of the market where the new addition is pushed back 15 feet, followed by another 10 feet when the new section reaches 185 feet, with a few more setbacks from there up to a final height of 230 feet. That is shorter than the neighboring Caledonia condo building though still taller than a number of the neighboring industrial buildings.

Altogether, the modifications reduce the expansion's overall size from 325,000 new square feet to roughly 285,000 square feet. The market currently contains about 1.2 million square feet of office and retail space.

"With these modifications, I believe this will be a great addition to the West Chelsea neighborhood," Commissioner Burden said before the commission voted unanimously to approve the project. "The additional office space will serve what has become a destination for creative and technology industries, and this new development will provide critical amenities to the High Line."

Despite the funding cut, Friends of the High Line also applauded the project's approval. "The City Planning Commission made a number of thoughtful changes to various aspects of the plan," Friends co-founder Robert Hammond said in an email. "We are pleased with the way the plan is moving forward, and we will continue to work with the community."

While polling has found general support for the expansion in the city, some locals still oppose the addition. "It's fiddling with the margins," said Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation. "When you look at how much West Chelsea has been upzoned in the past 10 years, more than any other community, when you add to that an upzoning of one of New York City's most beloved landmarks, it just adds insult to injury."

He said the affordable housing contributions are "a sham" because, like a kitty set aside from the 2005 rezoning of the neighborhood, into which these new funds will also be deposited, none of the money has so far been spent. Though that is more a problem for the city than Jamestown.

He vowed to continue fighting the expansion at the City Council, where it will be taken up in the next two months ahead of its likely approval. The project lies in Council Speaker Christine Quinn's district, who has found herself stuck between addressing the concerns of her neighborhood base in Chelsea and the demands of the real estate industry, who appear to favor her as their candidate in next year's mayoral elections. How she threads the needle on this project will be interesting to see.

Kind of amazing, kind of like an upscale mall.

Delancey Underground, a.k.a. the Low Line, a.k.a. New York's first underground green space, has had a lucrative summer, raising a not-unimpressive $150,00o.

Bowery Boogie reports that the project has met its summer goal of raising $75,000 in 75 days, earning matching funds from an angel investor in the process. The project, dreamed up by RAAD Studio founder James Ramsey, would transform the abandoned Williamsburg Bridge Trolley Terminal on the LES into a subterranean garden illuminated by skylights. Lately, it's also been racking up endorsements and support from local politicians, including State Senator Daniel Sqaudron, Representative Nydia Velázquez and Speaker Sheldon Silver.

Delancey Underground is planning to take advantage of the momentum with a model of the project in the Essex Street market building, galvanizing local support—and quite possibly some opposition—from those who don't envy the fate of Chelsea in the wake of the High Line's wild success.

The neighbors might be right to fear that the space, if built, will become "a tourist-clogged catwalk”—a glamorized version of grit for visitors that drives out the people and businesses that have long called New York home. At the same time, the High Line was a legitimately wonderful idea that transformed an outdated piece of infrastructure into a beautiful stretch of green space in a busy urban center very much in need of beautiful stretches of green space. And its failures would, one hopes, offer some lessons of what not to do if we're trying  to create public spaces that contribute more than tourist dollars to the neighborhoods that host them.

kvelsey@observer.com

Nabisco's old Chelsea plant, before the High Line showed up in the early 1930s.

Walking the High Line can be maddening and miraculous, often all at once. The crowds, the new buildings crowding out the views of the Hudson, all atop a highly manicured railroad trestle. Some park.

Yet it remains one of the best places to take in the city and its people—a big part of the reason the park attracts 3 million visitors a year, 10 times the original estimate, and has generated more than $2 billion in economic development.

The project could be considered one of the most successful real estate initiatives since Park Avenue was built by the Grand Central Railroad. And some day, probably sooner than most people realize, walking the High Line will be not unlike strolling down Park Avenue, with a wall of buildings on either side. And still, it will be the city’s new premier address.

Into this renaissance lumbers the Chelsea Market, the project that in many ways made this transformation possible when it opened two decades ago. Now it wants its share of the action, just like everybody else, planting itself on the High Line.

Already the old Nabisco factory looms over the park, as it has since the railroad was first raised in 1932, an early warning of all the development that would someday follow. Now Jamestown Properties, the Atlanta-based firm that has been involved in the building since 2004, wants to double this end of the red-brick behemoth, adding an eight-story addition on the old factory. “It’s not a fully completed asset,” a company executive told The Wall Street Journal in March of last year, when the project was announced.

The decision has terrified the neighbors, many of whom love to hate the High Line and hate to love the market, with all their crowds and commerce. But they have forged an unusual alliance to try and save both—even as they largely ignore the history of a building, and a neighborhood, that has been constantly changing to suit the needs of its masters.

The controversial 10th Avenue addition.

The building today, seen from the High Line.

Five years after the Chelsea Hotel was built, lending its name to what was then becoming a popular Gilded Age neighborhood for the city’s industrious class, the first New York Biscuit Company building began to take shape eight blocks south and one block west, in 1890.

From a series of red-brick bakeries rising six stories, New York Biscuit began to churn out the most famous sweet and savory crisps in the country. Eight years after the facilities opened, the competitors merged to form the National Biscuit Company, since known as Nabisco, and never looked back. By the 1920s, more than 22 buildings covering some 2 million square feet had been built.

The booming industry was good for business but bad for the neighborhood. The 10th Avenue freight line, the lifeblood of the neighborhood, was claiming ever more lives, so the decision was made to elevate it.

Louis Wirsching Jr., Nabisco’s chief architect at the time, came up with the turreted structure that still stands along 10th Avenue, operating from 1932 until Nabisco shipped out for suburban North Jersey in 1958.

The next year, the building was sold to Louis Glickman, a storied, bootstrapping developer who once threatened to tear down Carnegie Hall in favor of a new office building. He never did much with the old factory, nor did a succession of other owners.

In 1993, Irwin Cohen arrived, along with a group of Russian and Tajik backers, met through a friend who was an immigration attorney. They had $10 million in hand, all it took to buy an industrial building in the area back then. A former lawyer, Mr. Cohen had been doing a brisk business in renting up similar structures in Long Island City. “I like this type of building,” he said over a lunch of steamed vegetables last Friday at Sardi’s. “I couldn’t tell you why else I bought it.”

At the time, he had been working with City Hall on a plan to relocate the Flower district into new facilities, keeping it from moving to New Jersey. He thought the Nabisco plant, bought at auction, would be a good place. But the parking never worked out, so he had to figure on something different. A subsequent deal with the photography store B&H also fell through.

“And then I said, what can you do?” he recalled. “New York is food, clothing and shelter. We had lots of clothing in Long Island City, so I said, ‘Let’s do food.’”

Food was not such a wild idea, as the area was still very much the Meatpacking district, the cobblestones running red with blood. “When we first got in the building, we found three dead bodies, all on their knees, shot through the head, execution style,” Mr. Cohen said. He recalled having to devise clever ways to drive out the prostitutes who had overtaken the place.

His great innovation was requiring the wholesalers who took up in the building to also sell retail, creating the famous martketplace in the old factory’s concourse everyone now knows so well. It now attracts 300,000 visitors a year—the same number the High Line thought it would be getting. Amy’s Bread, the Lobster Place, Buon Italia, all helped attract companies to move their offices upstairs, starting with Oxygen, MLB.com and the Food Network, whose hosts regularly shopped downstairs during their shows early days. ABC’s Murder One and HBO’s Oz were among the shows shot in the vacant corners of the building, since transformed into office space.

Thus Jamestown’s desire to expand. Between the full occupancy here, and the success of Google in attracting yet more tech talent to the neighborhood, to say nothing of the fiber-optic infrastructure below ground that the techies obsess over, this has quietly emerged as one of the city’s premier office locations.

“We easily have 350,000 square feet of need now,” Michael Phillips, Jamestown’s COO, told The Commercial Observer in March. “We can’t just go to the vacant lot down the street and build a new building, because the infrastructure, the cooling tower, the electrical vaults, the recording studios, the servers are all up in this building.” (Mr. Phillips and his associates declined to comment for this article due to ongoing negotiations with the city over the building’s rezoning.)

The proposed hotel on Ninth Avenue.

The hotel will be built, Tetris-like, around the existing building.

But the idea of Chelsea becoming an office district is precisely what repels many locals. “This is not Times Square,” said David Holowka, an architect, longtime resident and member of the Save Chelsea coalition. He has drawn up proposals of his own, on his blog Archi-Takes, that proposes Jamestown move the bulk of its development to Ninth Avenue, where it would not overhang the High Line. He argues that the move is a baldfaced attempt to plunk down a new office building, with choice views up and down the city’s hottest new attraction.

Jamestown has said that this would destroy the interior space of the building, which everyone loves so much, and the structure on the western end is all that could accommodate the expansion. They already have plans for a nine-story hotel above the Buddakkan space on Ninth Avenue, that this would interfere with, though the developer told the community board in April it would abandon the hotel if asked—though it would still build all the space, a total of 330,000 square feet on both ends on top of the 1.2 million that already exists. This is half the size of the Googleplex (which Jamestown sold to the company for a record $1.8 billion), but also bigger than just about anything else in this corner of town.

“They’re really just trying to maximize their profits, aren’t they?” said Jeff Vandenburg, Mr. Cohen’s architect on the original Chelsea Market. He worked on a similar proposal to add onto the building in the middle of last decade, but he pointed out that his stepped down toward the High Line to minimize impacts. “Money finally wins out, and these things get as bulky as possible,” Mr. Vandenburg said. “It’s always bulkamania. It’s always bulkamania.”

The big issue for a lot of locals is whether or not the community actually benefits from this proposal. More office workers may be good for the city’s tech sector and overall economy, but what does Chelsea get out of this? Furthermore, the Chelsea Market was intentionally carved out of the rezoning that led buildings to skyrocket around the High Line. Now that it is being allowed to grow, there are fears other developers will make the same requests. “Cohen asked for it, and we fought him tooth and nail,” said Ed Kirkland, former chair of the preservation committee at the community board and one of the authors of the rezoning. “At least he was a local guy. Jamestown is just going to take their money back to Atlanta.”

There is a certain irony that people who bemoan the High Line at home, and profess to rarely visit it, are now fighting for its salvation from shadows and overdevelopment. Remember the park’s Martin Luther moment, when an anonymous neighbor posted a screed throughout the area concluding, “If you see an empty space, leave it empty. Otherwise there will be no spaces for New Yorkers.” Jamestown has not taken heed, and its main excuse for building is supporting the park: it will pay $19 million to help fund the ongoing maintenance, money Friends of the High Line, a booster for the project, is desperate for.

“The High Line may not be for us, but neither are these new buildings,” Mr. Kirkland said.

Architect Gregg Pasquarelli knows a thing or two about additions on top of Chelsea buildings. His SHoP Architects, better known for the Barclays Center and East River Esplanade, designed the Porter House across the street from the market. It happens to be one of the firm’s first successes, the dark metal box with the vertical lights running through it, perched atop the yellow-brick Old Homestead Steakhouse.

Mr. Pasquarelli has called it home since it opened a decade ago, and he said he welcomes his new neighbor, even if it will block his view.

“What’s wrong with congestion?” he asks. “I’m all for congestion, it’s the lifeblood of the city. The neighborhood can handle the density.”

This is the way New York, Chelsea, Nabisco, has always been developing. The city, Google, needs the space, needs the money. There is nowhere else to go but up. A development promise has been undone. It is not the first time, and it will not be the last. At least this is taking place atop an already big building in an already crowded district.

“I just wish they had been a little more ambitious with their design,” Mr. Pasquarelli said. “It’s fairly suburban.”

Here we thought the High Line was a celeb magnet... (Curbed

At Christine Ebersole cabaret party last night, New York magazine asked Matthew Broderick if he had ever been up on the High Line. His answer may—or may not—surprise you.

"I didn't go up to the High Line, which I live two blocks from," Mr. Broderick told party reporter Jennifer Vineyard. "That's when you really know you're from New York — you don't even bother when something is 100 feet from your house, even when everyone's talking about it!"

Funny, and here we thought he and his lovely wife had moved to the central Village. Maybe he's never been to Washington Square Park, either.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

While working on yesterday's story about the new Renzo Piano-designed restaurant planned for under the High Line, we stumbled on this rather amazing video of the new Whitney posted on the Hight Line blog.

A version of this pic has been shown at various community events, and grainy pictures of the space have emerged on sites like Curbed, but seeing it here in its entirety is pretty jaw-dropping. As big fans of the original Marcel Breuer building, The Observer was sorry to see the Whitney heading downtown. Now it seems clear we are gaining as much of what might be lost—which really isn't lost anyway with the Met moving in.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Last week, Friends of the High line released a request for offers [PDF] seeking a restaurant operator to move into a new restaurant space being constructed at the Gansevoort Street entrance to the elevated park. The lucky restaurateur will occupy a fancy glass shed designed by Renzo Piano, architect of the neighboring Whitney Museum, and local firm Beyer Blinder Belle.

Entries are due by March 30. Representatives for the High Line would not reveal who or how many operators had applied, but they are hopeful for a strong showing from some of the city's top chefs, many of whom operate establishments within walking distance. The winning respondent will receive a 10-year lease to run the space, though aspects like the design and menu for the restaurant will be created under consultation with Friends of the High Line.

“The new restaurant will activate the concrete plaza below the High Line, providing a new, welcoming space for people to share a meal while also supporting the park itself,” said Friends co-founder Robert Hammond. “We look forward to opening a restaurant that is as unique and special as the High Line.”

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

HL23

While he may be headed for one of Britain's largest divorce settlements, moneyman Pierre Lagrange seems to be doing just fine on this side of the pond. The former Goldman Sachs trader has just purchased the penthouse at new Chelsea hotspot HL23.

Mr. Lagrange, who paid $11.29 million for the pad, made headlines last fall when, after separating from his wife, he came out. He has since been linked to fashion designer Roubi L'Roubi.

With estates in London and Hampshire, Mr. Lagrange's newest acquisition will add to an already impressive collection of real estate holdings. Privacy must not be a premium for Mr. Lagrange, however, as his new home is smack dab in the middle of the ever-popular High Line.

The sale was originally reported by the Post back in December, although the price was unknown. The asking price of $12 milllion was a tad more than Mr. Lagrange paid.

The three-bedroom, three-bath home spans 3,634 square feet, with all the metallic detailing you'd expect from the haute moderne edifice. The condo includes a 1,173-square-foot wrap terrace where Mr. Lagrange can imagine he's strolling the grounds of his British estate. Sadly, there's no garage for his collection of vintage cars. Those will have to stay in Hampshire, we suppose.

eknutsen@observer.com

But what if instead of building a park, a subway or light rail line ran along the Far West Side?

It is not a ludicrous idea. Light rail has proven a boon in downtown Portland and elsewhere, and with the extension of the 7 train to Hudson Yards, the line could well have hooked up with the High Line and made a whole swath of under-developed Manhattan real estate more accessible.

A glittery park has achieved just as much, but this exact same debate is taking place in Queens, according to the Daily News. An old LIRR trestle that closed in the 1960s has been dubbed QueensWay by a group of park advocates hoping to turn the 3.5-mile stretch (three-times as long as the High Line) into a park.

The line stretches from Rego Park to the Rockaways, and it turns out those two communities are now at odds as those further from the city center lobby for the tracks reactivation instead of a park.

“Certainly a quick trip to JFK Airport from the core of the city is something people have talked about from Year One,” said George Haikalis, a civil engineer who heads the Institute for Rational Mobility, a nonprofit umbrella group for transit advocates. “Nobody in the rest of the world would be so dumb as to let a valuable asset like that sit there.”

[snip]