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New York construction projects don’t often get to use the word “finished.” But the High Line is about to pull off something almost as impressive as turning abandoned train tracks into one of the city's best outdoor spaces: losing its last construction shed.
The elevated park’s final garden is expected to open in November, 17 years after its first section welcomed visitors in 2009. At West 34th Street and Twelfth Avenue, the new planting beds will give its northern entrance a much greener greeting—and finally complete a public space that has opened in stages for nearly two decades.
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As The New York Times first reported, Dutch landscape designer Piet Oudolf, the plantsman behind the High Line’s naturalistic gardens, has returned to put the finishing touches on the space.
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“When the 34th Street Garden opens, the entire High Line will be open,” Richard Hayden, the park’s senior director of horticulture, told the Times. The new garden occupies 2,561 square feet of planting beds at the entrance to the Rail Yard Preserve, the park’s northernmost section. Around 2,000 perennials will fill the beds, including sedges, grasses and Heuchera villosa 'Autumn Bride,' a coral bells variety with pale-green leaves and white flowers.
Beneath all the foliage, there's another distinction: these are the High Line’s only plantings rooted directly in the ground. Most gardens along the elevated stretches grow in soil just 18 inches deep. The surroundings remain thoroughly Manhattan, with a massive parking lot on one side and a roadway on the other. Oudolf’s plantings will soften that view, while updated signage and new paving will help the entrance feel more inviting.
Fresh greenery appears farther south, too. At West 17th Street, the Prairie Terrace was replanted after nine years beneath scaffolding during construction of the neighboring Faena New York hotel. Its walkway reopened last fall and planting wrapped up in August. The revised garden accounts for changed sunlight and sightlines, with vine screens, additional shrubs and trees, and grasses including Blackhawks big bluestem, which darkens to purple and black as the season progresses.
Come next month, your next High Line walk could include a rare New York botanical specimen: an unobstructed view.