From Death Avenue to Living System: How a Killer Rail Line Became New York's Most Unlikely Park

Picture a cowboy on horseback on 10th Avenue. He’s not in a parade and not filming a movie. He’s waving a red flag at pedestrians so they don't get run over by a freight train carrying sides of beef up the West Side.

It’s the early 1910’s and hundreds of people have already been killed on these tracks. Locals have been calling the stretch Death Avenue for decades. About a century later this same stretch will become the most photographed public space in New York. Here is how we got from there to here.

Death Avenue and the West Side Cowboys

Starting in 1846, the New York Central freight line ran at street level up 10th and 11th Avenues. It carried meat, milk, produce, flour, and boxes straight into the factories and warehouses on the West Side of Manhattan.

Blocks-long trains rolled through intersections and pedestrian traffic for decades. By one count the tally was 436 dead by 1908. The city's fix, starting in the 1850s was to have a man on horseback ride ahead of every train, waving a red flag by day and a lantern by night. These were the West Side Cowboys. Literal cowboys. In Manhattan. Into the 20th century.

Even after elevated tracks eventually replaced most of the street level route, the Cowboys kept going, as some street-level traffic still rolled through. George Hayde, the last West Side Cowboy, made the final ride on March 29, 1941. A cowboy on 10th Avenue, cantering ahead of a freight train, in the same year the US entered WWII.

The Freight Line Goes Up

Public outcry over the death toll along the line eventually produced the 1929 West Side Improvement Project, which resulted in a plan to elevate the railroad above street level. What was then known as The West Side Elevated Line became operational in 1934. 

Its defining design was to run straight through buildings wherever possible, so freight could be unloaded inside factories without ever touching a sidewalk again. The most famous example is the old Nabisco factory on 10th Ave and 15th Street, now better known as Chelsea Market. A purpose-built 1930s addition included an open porch through the middle of the building so trains could pull up with flour from Toledo and boxes from Beacon, New York. 

The new elevated tracks eliminated 105 hazardous street-level crossings. For about two decades it worked the way it was intended, with no more fatalities due to trains reported (at least that I could find).

Then the interstate highway system arrived. Trucks took over from the freight lines as the preferred method for shipping goods in and out of the city. The southernmost section of the line was demolished in the 1960s and the last train rolled in 1980, famously carrying three carloads of frozen turkeys.

What Grew in the Meantime

For almost twenty years the structure sat rusting above the West Side. Urban explorers climbed up through holes in fences while property owners below wanted it gone. A demolition order was finally signed late in 2001.

Meanwhile, something else was happening up top. Wind had been blowing seeds onto the tracks, and the freight trains themselves had been carrying seeds from Upstate New York, and from as far away as the Midwest on their wheels and in their loads. By the late 1990s, somewhere between 160 and 210 plant species were growing spontaneously on the abandoned tracks. Wildflowers, grasses, small trees. A thirty-block meadow was floating thirty feet above the streets.

In 2000, a photographer named Joel Sternfeld started a full year of walking the line and shooting it season by season. His book Walking the High Line, first released in 2001, described what he was seeing as a hybrid landscape: neither wild nor cultivated, neither urban nor rural, neither alive nor dead.

Before Sternfeld's book, the High Line was a rotting eyesore destined for demolition. After, it became something unique that New Yorkers wanted to save.

The Save

In an October 1999 community board meeting about the future of the elevated structure, every single person in the room spoke in favor of tearing it down; with 2 exceptions.

Joshua David, 36, was a freelance writer who lived nearby. Robert Hammond, 30, worked in internet startups and lived in Greenwich Village. They had never met. They sat next to each other, and they walked out having decided, more or less on the spot, to try to save the High Line. As a result, Friends of the High Line, modeled loosely on the Central Park Conservancy, was founded.

They were not working without a precedent. Paris had already done this. The Promenade Plantée (now officially the Coulée verte René-Dumont) opened in 1993, running nearly five kilometers atop a 19th-century viaduct. It was the first elevated urban park ever converted from a derelict railway. David and Hammond cited it directly as proof that the idea wasn’t  crazy.

In 2002 incoming Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who saw the project as both a post-9/11 recovery story and a West Side economic engine, reversed the demolition order. In 2005, a "certificate of interim trail use" was issued, pulling the structure out of the active national rail system, and CSX handed the keys to the High Line to the City. The park was finally possible.

A Living System

The City ran an international design competition. The winning team, James Corner Field Operations (landscape architecture, project lead), Diller Scofidio + Renfro (architecture), and Piet Oudolf (arguably the most famous landscape planter alive) pitched a single phrase: agri-tecture. A living system, built on the industrial skeleton of the old rail line.

They would keep the rails, the gravel, and the concrete, and weave in meadow plantings drawn directly from the 160+ species that had reseeded themselves on the abandoned track. Today about 400 plant species grow on the line.

The design also included:

• Peel-up benches, rising out of the precast concrete planks of the walkway
• Amphitheater-style seating looking down over the traffic on 10th Avenue
• A spur at 30th and 10th, the first public space in New York City devoted solely to monumental contemporary art

The High Line also became a major outdoor art corridor, with more than 100 public art projects having appeared along its length, including sculpture, installations, billboards, video, performance, and sound works. Many of those pieces were shaped by the High Line’s elevated sightlines, restored rail structure, and layered industrial history.

Gansevoort to Moynihan

Section 1 opened in June 2009, running from Gansevoort Street to 20th Street. Section 2 followed in 2011, extending the line to 30th Street. Section 3, the Rail Yards section, opened in 2014, carrying the path from 30th to 34th Street and wrapping around what would become Hudson Yards.

In June 2023, the Moynihan Connector, which bridges the eastern end of the High Line with Manhattan West, directly across 9th Avenue from Moynihan Train Hall, opened. It is a 600-foot L-shaped extension, made up of a 260-foot Timber Bridge built from 163 Alaskan yellow cedar beams shipped from British Columbia, and a 340-foot Woodland Bridge carrying soil and plantings above the street.

Still Moving

Today, someone stepping off an Amtrak train at Moynihan Hall could walk almost the entire length of the old rail corridor above street level, through meadow plantings, past the old Nabisco loading dock, all the way to the Meatpacking District.

One stretch of 10th Avenue. A hundred and eighty years. The cowboys are gone but the rails are still up there, carrying wildflowers instead of sides of beef.