I’m not yet sure how much I agree with Michael Bourne’s new Millions essay, “The High Line: New York’s Monument to Gentrification,” but it’s so well-written and provocative. An excerpt about the decommissioned rail structure which was re-purposed for maximum shabby-chicness:

“To a certain degree, the success or failure of any public space depends on its ability to project the dreamscape of its users. New York’s Central Park, built in the latter part of the 19th century when Lower Manhattan was teeming with immigrant ghettos and soot-belching factories offered New Yorkers a pastoral fantasy of rolling hills and grassy meadows. The World Trade Center Memorial, with its sunken pools occupying the footprint of the twin towers, transforms a scene of carnage into a site for peaceful contemplation. What is fascinating about the High Line, what makes its design concept at once breathtaking and a little wince-inducing, is the particular dreamscape it evokes. Unlike earlier reclaimed urban industrial areas like Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco or New York’s own South Street Seaport, which airbrushed away the dirt and grime to transform the abandoned districts into theme-park versions of themselves, the High Line embraces its blight. Everywhere you look you see lovingly restored cracked plaster and million-dollar gardens made to look like neglected weed beds.

The High Line is the distressed skinny jeans of public parks, the gourmet taco truck of urban tourist attractions, and as such, it represents the high-water mark of the hipster aesthetic, which venerates poverty and decay as signifiers of authenticity. Thirty feet in the air, winding through the remains of one of the last blue-collar work sites Manhattan, the High Line is a monument to gentrification, a showcase of what can happen when hip young college graduates invade an impoverished area and repopulate it with art galleries and fancy restaurants. But here’s the truly amazing part: it all works. The underlying aesthetic of the park’s design may be a tad fatuous, girded as it is by unexamined assumptions about working-class authenticity, but the park itself is a gorgeously executed gem.” (Thanks Browser.)