Josh Rubin points to the preliminary designs for Manhattan's highline, which were unveiled at Monday's opening at MOMA.

Manhattan's highline project aims to take a 1.5 mile strip of disused overhead railway and turn it into a linear park.

It's a terrible idea.

Linear parks were all the rage when I was an architect, because they could use spaces that were generally wastelands, like old railway lines and, more importantly, because the long sweeping shallow curves made it easy to do presentations that looked great and truly modern.
The problem is that linear parks don’t really ever function as parks, a place to hang around and enjoy nature, they are often built (like the highline) in a place that does not lend itself to mature plant [oops - plant originally spelled as 'planet'] growth and the spaces themselves are not 'static' - in short they become expensive, fancy, shrub lined, bike lanes.

The double whammy for the Highline project is that it is a raised linear park, with all of the problems that separating pedestrian flow from the ground produced in large urbanism projects in the 50's and 60's.

The biggest problem the Highway has is that it is built on a Victorian cast-iron structure [update - it was actually built as late as 1930, still feels like Victorian engineering IMHO] that creates really nasty urban spaces beneath it - the challenge of this project is not so much the park but what is done to renovate it underneath.

Diller, Scofidio and now Renfro may do a better job here than most, if enough money is poured in to do something interesting and quirky, but over time whatever they do will decay and return to the inevitable character that 19th century iron structures seem to have.

Given the challenges of creating a park where the benefits of it being on a raised deck outweigh the negative aspects of the potentially dank, dreary space beneath, there is another option for the highline, which doesn't result in pretty drawings -

Tear it down

And free up another small piece of Manhattan from its curse - shadow.