The Crier: How did you come up with the idea for the piece?

David Freedlander: I first heard about the High Line at an art show called “Plane of Heaven,” put on by a group called Creative Time. It was in a warehouse where the High Line ends—actually, it was a slaughterhouse. A real slaughterhouse. There were signs on the wall that looked like they’d been stained with blood, and all these promotional photos of families sitting around a dinner table piled high with meat. But there was a window in the place where you could look out onto the High Line. I ended up going there every weekend and walking around, just looking at the High Line. This was in October, and the area was in the news—the Jets stadium had just failed.

When I called Joshua David to find out more about the Friends of the High Line, he’d only consent to a phone interview, so I went to a Community Board meeting where I’d heard he’d be and tracked him down. I knew what he looked like from the Friends of the High Line website, where there was a society page photo of him at a benefit with his arms around Kevin Bacon and Diane von Furstenberg.

TC: Did you get seduced by the High Line’s mystique?

DF: It’s an amazing structure. It’s very out of place. You wouldn’t notice it unless someone pointed it out to you—it’s so weird that there’s this thing in Manhattan that got “discovered” just because people started noticing it. It’s a part of Manhattan that was still unclaimed and had been until this got going. And by unclaimed, I mean that it was practically off the grid.

As pleasant as Central Park is, it’s a fake, manufactured wilderness. When you’re on top of the High Line it’s not like that.

TC: What does it look like?

DF: It’s overgrown, wild. There are bushes, brambles, trees, and tall grass. The last train on the High Line was in 1980, and even before 1980, trains ran very infrequently. People I spoke to who’d lived there that long said they couldn’t remember any trains. But that may be because no one saw the High Line. It’s like people who live next to highways—they don’t notice the cars.

TC: How did you get up there?

DF: There are a few places you can sneak up, though they’re all getting closed off now. It used to be a lot easier to get up there, apparently.

TC: Tell me how you started working on the piece.

DF: I started reading everything that had been written about the High Line, and then I started calling everyone whose name appeared in the articles. There was this guy John di Domenico, who got an NEA grant to rethink the High Line in 1983. When I called him, he said, “You are really going back on this thing.”

TC: In your piece, you write that no one who lived along the High Line ever really appreciated its scope—they were only familiar with the piece they could see from their window. It seems as though the writing about the High Line was similar—people focused on little pieces but never on the structure as a whole.

DF: Yes, there were a lot of little stories, but people were never really getting the scope of the whole thing. There was a lot of stuff that was just reacting to something that had just happened in the news. Everyone I talked to said they wished they’d written the piece I was working on.

TC: What do you think about the work the Friends of the High Line did?

DF: What those guys did is really amazing and inspiring. They were very savvy; they pulled all the right strings. When a piece of unclaimed or undiscovered land in Manhattan gets claimed and discovered, there’s always something that gets lost. The High Line is going to be very designed, but it’s hard to lament that too much because it was probably inevitable. They’re killing it but I don’t think there was an alternative. Everything has to have some kind of economic or civic function to exist. There’s no room for uselessness.

TC: What do you think would have happened if Hammond and David had never met?

DF: It probably would have been torn down. Then again, tearing it down would have been such an undertaking. It’s hard to imagine them tearing down the whole thing. The argument against what they’re doing to it now was that West Chelsea is not going to be a low-slung neighborhood anymore, but there were going to be high-rise condos with or without the High Line. How successful it will be, or even how that’s judged, remains to be seen.

TC: Your piece highlights the power of power—that is, it seems that Hammond and David were able to get so much done because they were so well-connected. Do you think that made a difference?

DF: I think so. There was a confluence of city power happening at the right time for them. Mayor Bloomberg was spending more money on art and architecture, and Manhattan was becoming this kind of playground for the well-to-do. [Former City Council speaker] Gifford Miller and Hammond worked together. It’s how something like this happens. It’s a question of what parks are—if Central Park is the lungs of the city, then the High Line is the eyes, or something. It’s a promenade. I guess it’s a park for urban hipsters.

TC: You also write about the growing usage of public-private partnerships in parks.

DF: It’s amazing. Things have to have an economic benefit. It’s not something that city governments think they have to pay for as a public good. The public square has been replaced by the Business Improvement District. Public schools are becoming charter schools. There’s been a gradual decline in places where people can meet for free, where you don’t have pay $2.50 for a latte to sit there and read, because you need to find people to pay for it.