Elevated park in New York City could be model for Detroit

It never hurts to look at what others are doing to improve their surroundings and see if there is something we can use here in our city to do the same. Here’s an interesting story that might work as a model for various urban structures here in Detroit.

Excerpt from the New York Times:

Phone calls and visitors and, yes, dreams from around the world are pouring into the small offices of the Friends of the High Line on West 20th Street in Manhattan these days.

Detroit is thinking big about an abandoned train station. Jersey City and Philadelphia have defunct railroad beds, and Chicago has old train tracks that don’t look like much now, but maybe they too…

The High Line’s success as an elevated park, its improbable evolution from old trestle into glittering urban amenity, has motivated a whole host of public officials and city planners to consider or revisit efforts to convert relics from their own industrial pasts into potential economic engines.

In many of these places there had already been some talk and visions of what might be, but now New York’s accomplishment is providing ammunition for boosters while giving skeptics much-needed evidence of the potential for success. The High Line has become, like bagels and CompStat, another kind of New York export.

“There’s a nice healthy competition between big American cities,” said Ben Helphand, who is pushing to create a park on a defunct rail line in Chicago. “That this has been done in New York puts the onus on us to do it ourselves and to give it a Chicago stamp.”

Read the entire article here.