The Highline-type parks popping up all over thread

[mrnyc]

Seems to be a quite an urban trend - do we have a thread for this? Can we post news about other cities versions of NY's Highline Park here?

I know there are plans for Queensway, Jersey City and Chicago has Bloomingdale Trail -- there are many others planned or underway as well.



Here is Cleveland's planned version:


Red Line Greenway advocates plan 'unveiling' of visionary concept at Wednesday meeting (photos)





By Steven Litt, The Plain Dealer
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on May 26, 2015 at 7:00 AM, updated May 26, 2015 at 7:15 AM


CLEVELAND, Ohio – Backers of the Red Line Greenway are planning a "community unveiling" on Wednesday of a concept for a three-mile linear park that could significantly brighten the future of the city's West Side.

A brainchild of the Rotary Club of Cleveland, the greenway aims to repurpose 2.5 miles of unused right-of-way alongside the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority's Red Line for public enjoyment, recreation and commuting.

The path would run from the Zone Recreation Center at West 65th Street to downtown Cleveland at Superior Avenue and West Ninth Street.

Counting a half-mile of trail within Zone, the trail would be 3 miles in total length.

It would become part of an expanding network of regional trails and bike paths including the Towpath Trail along the Cuyahoga River, and the proposed East Side Greenway that would link 18 communities on the eastern side of Cuyahoga County to downtown Cleveland, Lake Erie and the Cuyahoga River.

The Rotary and partners will hold a free public meeting on the Red Line Greenway from 6:30 to 8 p.m. Wednesday at the St. Ignatius High School Breen Center for the Performing Arts, 2008 West 30th St., Cleveland, to provide an update and seek feedback. (The main presentation can be seen at the bottom of this post).

"It's our unveiling to the community," Matt Koriath, a Cleveland insurance executive and co-founder of the Red Line project, said Saturday.

"A lot of people having been coming down for tours and have heard of it, but this is our big unveiling to the communities and neighborhoods it will run through," he said. "It's to get the word out and get community support, and to help lead the charge so this can come to fruition and become a reality."

Cleveland's answer to the High Line

Koriath and other backers describe the project, which would include a path over the Cuyahoga River with spectacular views from the RTA viaduct, as Cleveland's answer to New York's widely acclaimed High Line Park, a landscaped greenway atop a disused rail line on the lower West Side of Manhattan.

"This is all about describing where it is, and what we're proposing for the trail and access sites, subject to engineering, safety, cost analysis," said Leonard Stover, a longtime Red Line volunteer and Koriath's fellow co-founder of the greenway.

Wednesday's meeting will be co-sponsored by the Rotary, the Cleveland chapter of the Urban Land Institute, the nonprofit LAND Studio, St. Ignatius, and by project partners RTA, Cleveland Metroparks and the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency.

Evan Peterson, a landscape architecture student at Louisiana State University, will also make a presentation about the project Wednesday.

As described by Stover, the Red Line Greenway is pivoting from dreams to reality.

Project history

It all started in the 1970s as a project called "Rapid Recovery," in which Rotary volunteers began weeding and removing trash from the highly visible right-of-way along the Red Line rapid tracks on the West Side, a then-unsightly entry point to downtown Cleveland for visitors arriving from Cleveland Hopkins International Airport.

red line greenway before:after.png
A before/after rendering of a portion of the Red Line Greenway.
Red Line Greenway

Rapid Recovery later morphed into the urban gardening and tree-planting effort that evolved into the nonprofit ParkWorks organization, now LAND Studio.

Rotary volunteers kept working along the Red Line, however, gradually improving a strip of land along the RTA tracks 2.5 miles long and as wide as 300 feet.

Stover estimated the value of the work done so far at $1 million.

The view up there is pretty cool

The objective now is to open the greenway to the public as a linear park with trails for recreation and commuting that would serve West Side neighborhoods including Detroit-Shoreway, Stockyards, Ohio City, Clark-Fulton and Duck Island, plus the Flats and downtown.

Partners and validation

In 2014, the Rotary signed memorandum of understanding with RTA and Metroparks agreeing to explore the Red Line concept together.

The project received a powerful form of validation in January when it was awarded $2,080,000 through NOACA from the federal Congestion Mitigation Air Quality program, jointly administered by the federal highway and transit administrations.

Stover said the project has been divided into three phases, with an estimated total cost of $13 million.

The $4.7 million Phase I would extend from the RTA viaduct west to West 41st Street. Phase II, at a cost of $1.3 million, would extend further west to Zone Recreation Center. And the $7 million Phase III, the most challenging and expensive, would extend the trail all the way across the RTA viaduct into downtown Cleveland.

Stover said the earliest the construction could begin on Phase I would be 2019, barring a major donation that could jump-start construction sooner.

RTA recently determined in a nearly completed analysis that Phase I of the greenway is physically feasible on its property.

Feasibility

Michael Schipper, deputy general manager of RTA for engineering and project management, said Friday that the analysis includes a site and property survey that would be shared with the Cleveland Metroparks, which will partner with the Rotary on the project's design.

"I'm on board with it actually happening," Schipper said of the greenway. "We believe we'll be able to figure out how to safely operate and maintain our trains while allowing the Phase I section to be built."

Schipper said the analysis contemplates providing public access in Phase I to an observation area on the RTA viaduct over the river.

"The view up there is pretty cool," he said. "It's neat."

The RTA analysis also includes a concept for a switchback trail that would descend a steep hillside from the west approach to the viaduct down to the Columbus Road Bridge at the edge of the river.

From there, the greenway could be connected to the proposed Lake Link Trail along the west bank of the river, a project now known as the Cleveland Foundation Centennial Trail.

A staircase could also be built from the centennial trail up the slope of Irishtown Bend to the northeast corner of the parking lot at the West Side Market, Schipper said.

Stover said concepts for other access points in the Phase I section of the project would be outlined Wednesday for public response.

The Rotary and its partners will use the public feedback gathered at the meeting to help refine the project's design. He said he also wants to raise funds to further publicize the project and to sell naming rights for construction.

"I'm really excited," Stover said about the progress made so far on the project. "It feels tremendous. It's our charge to see this thing through."


http://www.cleveland.com/architectur...l#incart_river

[sentinel]

Great idea for a thread! (Also, ^^LOVE to see that in Cleveland).

The '606' park/trail (formerly the 'Bloomingdale Trail') in Chicago officially opens to the public on June 6. It's about 2.7 miles, east to west. It's already having an effect on heightening real estate prices directly along the trail.









http://the606.org/design/final-design-plans/







http://www.chicagotribune.com/redeye...togallery.html

[dave8721]

Miami has the "under-line" in the works that would convert the area underneath the Metrorail from Downtown south to its terminous point into one long park.

nice before and after pics at this site:
https://www.theunderline.org/

[sobchbud1]

Also in the works for Miami is the 7 mile Biscayne Line connecting virtually all of Miami's waterfront from the Miami River all the way north past the Julia Tuttle Expressway. It will include a series of floating bay walks that will to connect existing ones. Mega developer Related is set to pay for the North portion through the Edgewater/Omni neighborhood. I dream that this will some day connect to the Underline... I think it can be done.

http://miami.curbed.com/tags/biscayne-line

[M II A II R II K]

Seoul Sky Garden: Elevated Urban Park on an Abandoned Highway


http://weburbanist.com/2015/05/15/ab...elevated-park/

[mhays]

At first glance, Cleveland's version seems to include a bike/walking route that doesn't currently exist. That alone should make it more successful. A "park" that's actually useful or a route for a lot of people will get more use than one that's a pure escape. The latter type often becomes underused.

Weather is a challenge, with cold winters and baking summers. The more trees the better.

[Crawford]

I suspect a lot of these High Line knockoffs aren't going to work exactly as intended. They'll be nice amenities, though will probably function in unanticipated manners.

The thing with the High Line is that it's very, very location-specific and funding-specific. It wouldn't work in 99% of NYC, to say nothing of Cleveland. It wouldn't work without a half-billion in public funding and a fundraising/curating machine led by a board of super wealthy. These other viaducts might spur interesting, totally different, more democratic usages, though.

[sentinel]

^You provided a rebuttal to your own criticism, well done.

I will agree that on the surface, these examples so far in this thread may appear to be High-line 'knock-offs', but I believe there are considerable programmatic and siting considerations that make each design pretty unique to their respective environments, which in turn creates a nice variety of case-studies.

We'll see how successful the 606/Bloomingdale Trail will be for example, but I think it's still a unique beast, a couple of time removed from the High-line.

[Via Chicago]

Originally Posted by Crawford

I suspect a lot of these High Line knockoffs aren't going to work exactly as intended. They'll be nice amenities

Well, obviously I think it intends on the intention of the park. At least in Chicago's case, thats the whole intention: to be a nice amenity. And it will link a dense neighborhood that had previously been cut off from itself due to the tracks. The focus on creating a cycling/jogging corridor across the West Side is a unique component that I suspect a lot of people will utilize. I dont think anyone is under the illusion that multi billion dollar skyscrapers are just going to spring out of nowhere ala High Line. Again, its already a developed, residential neighborhood. But people are definitely excited about it, and its been in the planning stages for as long as the High Line was. The idea had been floated as early as the mid 90's, and gathering support and financing in earnest has been well over a decade. And if the recent rise in property values directly along the path are any indication, its already brought investment and attention to the area before its even officially opened.

[mrnyc]

well yeah crawford the cleveland article expects a total cost of around $13M, so no I don't think this park or any of these other knockoff parks for that matter are going to match the Phase I & II ($152M, or $165M in today's dollars) and today's currently under-baked Phase III ($90M) nyc highline park, where we enjoy evian water out of the water fountains (hardeeharhar - sorry folks thats an early highline park joke!).

still, i think it would be cool to keep track of similar projects around the world on one thread. i am also interested to see and hear about related spinoff development near these other urban habitrail parks, as is happening with the highline park.

[Austinlee]

I love them! Build them everywhere IMO.

[mhays]

These three types seem to make sense:
1. Island of greenery amidst huge density, with mixed-uses.
2. Great views you can't get otherwise.
3. Shortcut/bridge.

Put one of these in a random urban district in a midsized city and I doubt it would do well.

The mixed-use point is important because it can't just be a lunch hour thing, or a weekend thing, or a tourist thing. Being an extremely dense office district isn't enough.

One basic challenge is that people don't climb stairs unless there's a good reason (despite wishful thinking by a lot of designers!) A tourist might go up for the view if it looks easy, but a local might go up once and never return unless there's a good reason.

Another challenge is that to make it useful, it needs to be accessible in short increments. You can't rely on a freeway interchange every 3/4 of a mile, or a lot of people will need to walk 10 minutes to use it even if they live next door. So you end up with a lot of stair towers, and at some point you need handicapped access. Of course actual bridges can skip much of that.

[sentinel]

^Indeed, good break down, btw.

Sometimes people forget that construction cost differences play a huge role in a project's scope and eventual outcome - for example, construction costs, even for outdoor leisure or activity spaces can be between 2.5-4 times higher in NYC than in Chicago (with a number of factors including typology, material sourcing, labor, design and engineering, land value, etc, dictating what the actual construction cost difference would be). So a project like the 606 (I HATE that name) which is projected to top out at about $100 million for all 2.7 miles, would probably cost at least $300 million in NYC, which is somewhat in line with mrnyc's estimate for the Highline...even though the two projects are worlds apart in terms of siting, surrounding urban density and programming. Just a thought...

[TimCity2000]

maybe not quite what you're looking for, and certainly a much smaller scale than most of these... but Birmingham (AL) is turning an old, abandoned 4-block railroad cut into a pedestrian greenway. so instead of being elevated, it's sunken.

photos are taken from al.com:

[Private Dick]

You know it's become a thing when Erie PA is trying to do it to an old industrial overpass.

[tech12]

It's not exactly the same, but the new Transbay Terminal in SF will have a three block long park on the roof. I always liked the feel of elevated parks, so it's nice to see a lot of them getting built.

[Leo the Dog]

Have cities budgeted for the maintenance of structures? Or will they rely on federal funds to replace/rebuild the structures once the root systems and decay set in?

I like the idea, but seems to be an expensive park when they could just demolish them and build a permanent parkway system instead.

[ardecila]

I should point out, for the record, that Paris did it first at the Promenade Plantee way back in 1993 (the landscape is appropriately PoMo but tasteful). Other rail-trails are much older and some are even elevated, although they are usually pretty barebones (e.g. the Weber Spur in Chicago).

In Paris, space under the viaduct was also used for shops, which is common for the arched viaducts of Europe (London, Berlin, Vienna) but not so much for the solid embankments in American cities. The only long arched viaduct I can think of in an American city is along Queens Boulevard.


src

[Private Dick]

Originally Posted by Leo the Dog

Have cities budgeted for the maintenance of structures? Or will they rely on federal funds to replace/rebuild the structures once the root systems and decay set in?

I like the idea, but seems to be an expensive park when they could just demolish them and build a permanent parkway system instead.

I'm sure it varies based on the city, organizations involved, etc. Root systems should not play any part, since plantings are in contained areas with full substrate and drainage systems in place -- just like green roofs (professionally-designed/built green roofs, that is) do not grow root systems into the actual roofs of buildings.

The idea is that an elevated parkway like these offers views of urban environments not possible with ground-level parks, and also offers uninterrupted linear parkway in the very middle of cities... without street crossings or any other obstacles. And it is the very fact that they are elevated which makes them able to be used as parkland. You think that a 2-mile long, uninterrupted linear park could be built in Manhattan?? Or in any city? This type and configuration of park could simply not be built in center of cities, and certainly not for the comparatively low expense of reusing idle infrastructure. Also preservation. There are good reasons that they are popular.

[hammersklavier]

It's definitely become a fad. I mean...Erie?!?

Here in Philly, there are plans to make the Reading Viaduct, a massive old railroad wye just north of Center City, into an elevated park.

Significantly more controversial is an attempt to make the City Branch, a sunken route which connects to the Viaduct, into a park as well. Philadelphians are skeptical of sunken parks to begin with (despite activists' wishful thinking); to make things worse, transit activists want mass transit in the same corridor. A busway is currently proposed; light and heavy rail ideas have been bandied about. And ownership issues are making the less-controversial elevated section more difficult to develop.