Wednesday, 10 September 2003 | Walking the High Line

We walked around the west side for an hour, trying to figure out how to hoist ourselves onto the grassy out-of-use railroad that was several feet above our heads. In one parking lot, the attendant yelled at us when he saw us trying to scale a wall. He said something about getting cut and going to jail. We foolishly considered trying to climb on the roof of a gas station by slyly running up some mysterious stairs, trying to climb a ladder propped against a building, and asking residents of apartments whether they'd mind if we crawled through their windows and onto the High Line. Two phone calls (1, 2) and one sighting of a man walking in the spot where we wanted to be, and we were there, in the no man's land of tall grass and rust-colored tracks and trash, spying on the city in a spot where we believed we were invisible.

During the first stretch, we saw many of the buildings we'd considered scaling, and acknowledged the wisdom of dismissing them. We stepped through jaggedly cut holes in fences and slid on our backs between sheet metal barriers and gravel, discussing and guessing at what point our mothers would've decided it was all too much and turned back. We ambled slowly down the tracks, stopping to take pictures and lean over railings to watch the people below. We picked up and examined bizarre debris, evidence that humans had been there before us. (Of course they had, but the place looked so forgotten that it was easy to pretend we were on a post-apocalyptic scavenger hunt.)

Dismounting the High Line proved to be harder than mounting it. Some people we'd run into had suggested that we jump to the top of a building, and, from there, jump to the top of a truck. However, the only building and truck we found were a Tomb Raider distance away, so we backtracked and kept looking, until we found a rusty staircase we'd been told about. It wore a No Trespassing sign posted for our benefit, and some of the stairs gave underneath our weight, but it was the high, razor wire fence around the base of the stairs that made them intimidating. One at a time, we swung our bodies around a giant girder, hooked our arms around a barbless part of the fence for balance, inched our way down, and jumped. The security guard on duty yelled after us, but Michael hung back and said something the guard must've found charming, and he let us go.

:my High Line photos: