Highline And Lowlife

I read that only three cities in the world have one: Paris, New York, and St. Louis. These three cities have parks created from abandoned elevated railroad lines.

When we were in New York in September, we walked New York’s elevated park, called the Highline. Lots of people were walking the Highline. It was great fun to be above ground at second-story level. We could look into buildings. We could look down at New York’s street life: food trucks, street festivals, temporary roller skating rinks, restaurants, art galleries. We could look outward at vistas full of skyscrapers.

The New York Highline changed about every block. Sometimes you walked down the middle in between plantings on both sides. Sometimes you walked on one side and the plantings on the other side were wide enough to almost look like a field. At one point you came across wooden chaise lounges with people sitting on them enjoying the sun.

The plantings amazed me. They appeared to be drought-resistant native plants chosen because they do not need maintenance. These plants were thriving.

Here are 3 Highline photos: the chaise lounges, peeking into a building, a vista of skyscrapers.

The history of New York’s elevated railroad park is inspiring. It was a grass roots effort, first to prevent demolition, then to get the park funded. The history of St. Louis’ elevated railroad park is also inspiring. It was a grass roots effort, promoted by bicyclists.

Last weekend, the dogs and I walked St. Louis’ version of the Highline. It is called the Branch Street Trestle, and the differences with New York’s Highline were profound.

No one else was on the Trestle. It is a paved surface that is uniform block after block. There are no plantings.

The Trestle sits in an area called the Near North Riverfront, which is isolated from the city by an Interstate highway. The area does not have art galleries, street fairs, food trucks, or skating rinks.

The Near North Riverfront is used for storage: road salt, oil drums, strange wrapped things that look like giant sea scallops. Hardly anyone lives there, and very few people work there because you don’t need many workers to maintain storage facilities. However, these few residents and workers must like to drink because you pass a number of seedy bars to get to the Trestle. Actually, “seedy” is too kind a description of these bars.

Here are 3 Branch Street Trestle photos: Petey and Sierra roaming free, giant scallops, a vista of rusty chemical storage tanks.

One reason there were no people on the Trestle is that few people in St. Louis know about it, in spite of the fact that the Trestle leads right to a bridge where you can walk across the Mississippi River and wind up in Illinois. I plan to do some publicity, and when warm weather comes next year, I will lead a walking tour in the Near North Riverfront.

The walking tour will feature the elevated park and the seedy bars, so the name of the tour will be “Highline and Lowlife”.

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NOTE: Doug's best stories have been collected into a book: Puppy Out Of Breath.  Price = $11.  You can purchase a copy at  http://www.puppyoutofbreath.com