The High Line

A freight rail viaduct that last carried a train in 1980 is now a mile-and-a-half garden running thirty feet above the West Side, from the Whitney Museum at Gansevoort Street up past Hudson Yards. The planting, designed with Piet Oudolf, keeps the spirit of the self-seeded wilderness that grew up between the rails during the abandoned years — grasses, sumac, birch — now threaded with the old track itself.

The pleasure is in the elevation. You walk at the height of second-story windows, through buildings rather than past them, with the Hudson flashing between warehouses on one side and a rolling exhibition of Chelsea architecture on the other. Benches rise out of the decking; at the 10th Avenue Square, bleacher seating faces a picture window over the traffic below, which turns the avenue itself into the show.

It gets crowded — famously so — but the crowds are solvable. Walk it early, walk it in drizzle, or walk it in winter when the grasses go bronze and the steam rises off the rooftops. The northern spur around the rail yards is the stretch most visitors never reach and often the best half-mile of it.