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Prospect parks: walking the Promenade Planteé and the High Line

When it comes to disused elevated rail lines radically remade into elevated urban garden paths, Paris and New York lead the way. Today, the Manhattan exemplar, the High Line, is the more visited, celebrated, and criticized, but the Parisian one got there first, with Le Promenade Plantee opening in 1998, more than a decade before the first segment of the High Line opened in 2009. Paris is still, from its core to its extremities, a city of ‘firsts’, in public space as in much else, determined to do more than live off its heritage as the capital of the nineteenth century. New York, after first rediscovering the value of its streets and sidewalks, has been equally determined to demonstrate that its urban identity is not petrified into nostalgia for its heady time as the presumptive capital of the twentieth century. Even before the first stroke of design intent, redundant (no longer useful) elevated railways like this have unique character: they are both disengaged and urban, a place apart and a place connected. The design decisions about access, plants, materials, restoration, exploit and enrich this inherent tension. At the risk of an invidious comparison, the walkway design in New York seems the more pointed, poignant, and effective in opening up fresh unanticipated experiences, making the street and the skyline seem new again (figure 1). It makes the case, more strongly than in Paris, that there is both the possibility of and value in framing perceptions and associations in a new, or newly invented, linear landscape. The design may not force the perspective of a folly or bracket a painterly copse or cliff as an earlier generation of designers might have done in their gardens, including public parks, but the work is artful and intentional, and extremely aware of the walker’s perceptions, and while distinct, impacted by changes in culture and media, the understanding of visual experience draws on design ideas beginning before either the nineteenth or the twentieth century. In part because of its more built-up context, often running between buildings rather than alongside an avenue, the High Line has a new view, a new angle, a new perception, new tunnels, outlooks, overlooks, flyovers, and step-downs at every block. The greatest risk, as with any landscape depending on novelty and surprise, is that this could get old. Because it uses the changing, mobile city, not merely its own devices, for its effects, it may hold on to its youthful exuberance for a very long time. For some, however, the Promenade in Paris has a calmness and subtlety that has a preferable weighting of the Jesuitical endeavor being in but not necessarily of the city-world (figure 2). And in any case, like the more recent High Line, the Promenade is a powerful tool for reframing the view of city at large and a district within it. The intent of this essay is to walk these contemporary ‘prospect’ parks, and to interpret them through their effectiveness in reframing the city, from specific design decisions to the unexpected accidents and serendipities of their respective urban conditions. The creative leap of faith in both projects is that the design of the path, its plantings, and edges can lead to a heightened experience of the strangeness and pleasure of walking thirty-feet up through a city, different from the opportunities of a conventional park or sidewalk or building. These are viaducts, and not surprisingly viaducts offer the greatest parallel, but even there, there is rarely the other foundational uniqueness of you are in the middle of the city, in close proximity to its rushing traffic, human and vehicular, but without the need to brace and watch for cars, bikes, and the other modes of hurtling by on wheels. The experience has meaning in itself, and implications for the future of cities: how we see, occupy, and circulate in them, and how we will build the next generation of urban paths.