Walking along the city’s most innovative public space, The High Line, you’ll find it difficult to believe that this was ever anything other than what it is today. Beautiful, landscaped, busy and evolving, today’s High Line gives only a suggestion of its previous function. Built in the 1930s, this formerly rusting and overgrown stretch of metal served as train tracks elevated thirty feet in the air, a solution to the many accidents occurring between freight trains and street-level traffic after street-level railroads were authorized in 1847. As you walk on this transformed elevated path, from Gansevoort Street in the Meatpacking District to 30th Street in Chelsea, you can spot the railroad tracks among the fields of flowers.

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