The High Line was a freight train track before it was a park

The High Line is a long, narrow park that runs about 30 feet above the street on Manhattan’s West Side. It used to be a freight railroad. Trains once rumbled at street level along Tenth Avenue, hitting so many people that the road earned the grim nickname “Death Avenue.” The city lifted the tracks into the air in the 1930s to fix that. The last train rolled through in 1980, reportedly hauling three carloads of frozen turkeys.

For years the abandoned line sat rusting, with wild grass and flowers growing between the rails. In 1999 two neighbors, Joshua David and Robert Hammond, started a group called Friends of the High Line to save it instead of tearing it down. A section opened as a park in 2009. The design kept the railroad feeling, with planting beds threaded through the old tracks and benches that peel up out of the walkway.

It is a city park, owned by NYC and cared for with Friends of the High Line, and walking it is free. You get quiet views of the Hudson River and the streets below, plus public art along the way. Enter by stairs or elevators between the Meatpacking District and Hudson Yards, then let the old freight line carry you above the traffic for a while.