The Highline: Monument to Modern Ruin

Essay with photos

When the High Line, a defunct elevated train track on Manhattan’s west side, re-opened as a park in 2009 it was something new and curious.

“The High Line: Monument to Modern Ruin” (2010), is an essay about the changing nature of urban space and how we are encouraged (or discouraged) to engage with spaces that script our movement and interactions. The High Line’s relationships to icons of modernity—the steam engine, the public promenade, the flâneur, the arcade and cinema—are systematically unpacked, partially through the lens of Walter Benjamin. The essay posits that the material residue of history and memory manifested in built urban infrastructures has been recast by contemporary architects as an apparatus for viewing the city as cinematic images. The renovated ruin operates as “an allegory of the media-saturated capitalist metropolis – one that both counters and proliferates the myth of utopian progress.” The essay with original photographs was published in September/October issue of Afterimage: Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism,Vol. 38, Issue 2. 2010. With original photographs. Download PDF of essay here.