Description
This overlook was first a railway. Until the 1930s, freight trains ran along the roadway of Tenth Avenue itself, so deadly that it was nicknamed “Death Avenue”; riders known as the West Side Cowboys went ahead of them waving red flags, and the last of them did not dismount until 1941. In 1934 the West Side Improvement lifted the tracks onto a viaduct, above the streets and right through the warehouses; the last train ran there in 1980. Slated for demolition, the structure was saved by two neighbours, Joshua David and Robert Hammond, who founded Friends of the High Line in 1999. From 2009 it became a garden in the air, designed by James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro and planted by Piet Oudolf. At 17th Street, a wooden amphitheatre steps down to a glass bay opening onto the avenue: it is from there that the photograph looks north.
It holds an ordinary winter, the day after a snowfall. Pushed into blackened banks along the kerbs, the snow tells the season; the wet asphalt returns the lights of the cars; in the distance, the avenue dissolves into a milky haze. Almost perfectly centred, the perspective turns the street into a corridor that the eye travels up, block after block. Without meaning to, the image has become an archive: the Moran’s sign, painted over several storeys of brick, belonged to a Chelsea restaurant that closed in 2015, and the billboards, the holiday banner and the yards in the foreground tell of a neighbourhood that glass towers have since largely replaced.
On 22 February 1893, Alfred Stieglitz waited three hours in a snowstorm at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 35th Street to make Winter, Fifth Avenue; Saul Leiter later photographed the city in colour, behind snow and misted windows. The New York series follows the city through its bridges, its avenues and its rooftops; here, the avenue, seen from the railway that freed it from the trains.
