One day in 1999, as Joshua David walked the streets of Chelsea, he noticed a strange railway 30 feet in the air. Resting on steel girders, it ran in the middle of city blocks, cut through buildings, and sat above low-rise warehouses, auto-body shops, and other pieces of urban detritus on Manhattan’s forgotten Far West Side. David, a freelance travel writer, was working on an article for the glossy City magazine about Chelsea, a Manhattan neighborhood in the midst of changing from a gritty, industrial area into a glitzy, residential one. An incongruous mix of galleries and loud, pumping clubs were moving into the huge warehouse spaces abandoned by manufacturers.

      David had lived in the neighborhood for over a decade, but had never given much thought to the undistinguished, rusting structure. He asked people he was interviewing if they knew anything about it, but none of them had thought much about it, either. It was just part of the landscape.

      If anything it was a nuisance. Running mid-block between 10th and 11th avenues, it cut off views of the Hudson River for those living on its eastern side. The sliver of sidewalk below was always in shadow, and it was home to thousands of pigeons who relieved themselves on pedestrians as they passed underneath.

      Like most New Yorkers, David knew his city in concentric circles—the street he lived on, the blocks to and from the subway, the hike to the nice grocery store, the rings spreading outwards with diminishing degrees of familiarity. The High Line, as the structure was called, cut against this circular logic; it ran north-south for 22 unencumbered bocks. Those who lived in the area only knew the piece of the line in front of their window.

      As he walked north, David came to realize the true scale of the structure. “The thing that captivated me about it was that there wasn’t a break in it,” he explained one evening over martinis at Florent, the Meatpacking District diner. “You could go from Gansevoort to 34th Street without stopping. It was this closed, invisible place no one had been.”

     By now the story of how Friends of the High Line saved the structure from certain demolition has become accepted urban popular wisdom, and its founders, David and Robert Hammond, have become internationally recognized symbols of can-do civic spirit. But the High Line almost didn’t make it. When David and Hammond first teamed up to save the railway, after randomly meeting at a community board meeting and soon after David’s fateful walk through the far reaches of his neighborhood, it was incredibly close to being torn down. Chelsea Property Owners, a group that was basically a front for Edison Properties, the New Jersey-based developers who made their fortune on parking lots and mini-storage spaces, had been advocating to demolish the trestle and fill the open space with buildings. For years, they had been talking with area businesses and homeowners, most of whom also favored taking the wrecking ball to the High Line, as did the Giuliani administration.

      Neither Hammond nor David had much political organizing experience, but they weren’t total neophytes. David had been tangentially involved in the gay rights movement when he first moved to the city in the mid-’80s, and Hammond had worked as a fund-raiser for his old Princeton buddy and soon-to-be City Council speaker Gifford Miller. Hammond and David also happened to be extremely smart, savvy and charming. And they were both looking for something to devote their boundless energy to. David was burning out of the constant grind of travel writing and Hammond was a freelance dot-commer at the tail end of the boom. They were ready for the challenge.

      Today, Hammond holds the title of executive director of the organization; he’s the public face and does the political outreach. David talks to the press and works with the community board. Their skills are complementary—Hammond is the visionary, the impulsive one; David has the historical view and briefs staffers about the changing dynamics of Chelsea and the West Village. David is the thoughtful one, methodical, and with his thick glasses and thinning hair perpetually sticking up from the back of his head, he seems not unlike the smart spastic kid in elementary school who mellows out as he gets older. Hammond is the ultra-hipster, who gave up a financial career to try his hand at painting. Usually sporting skinny ties and dress shirts with homemade designs, Hammond is moody and earnest. With David’s glossy magazine background and Hammond’s business background, both are equally adept at knowing what makes someone sign on to the cause and, more important, contribute money. Each knew he needed the other—the High Line was way too much of a long shot for one person to tackle alone.

      “It became clear that this structure was not going to save itself,” David said. “What upset me about it was that in the tradition of Penn Station, something was going to be torn down and it didn’t have a chance to be examined. This was going to be demolished and no one would say a peep about it.”