(Von Furstenberg and Diller have also pledged one hundred thirty million dollars to refurbish nearby Pier 54, in the Hudson River.) Von Furstenberg, a high-end fashion designer, and her billionaire husband, Barry Diller, donated upwards of thirty-five million dollars towards the completion of the High Line.
There is a set of stairs up to the railroad track a few steps past an enormous Diane von Furstenberg store. This is not just incidental to life here, the thinking goes, but integral to it: Everyone, or almost everyone, suffers the city together.Īt least as far as most pedestrians are concerned, 14th Street’s westernmost terminus is the High Line, an elevated, linear park built on a disused, mile-and-a-half long section of the West Side Freight Line. There is an idea of New York, and especially of Manhattan, as a place where the wealthy and the less wealthy (and even the not-at-all wealthy!) live in close proximity, even adjacent, to each other, and that this arrangement produces ambition in the latter to attain what the former has, and some amount of respect for the humanity of the latter in the former.
Manhattan’s 14th Street is never a pleasant place to be, but there are few streets that one can comfortably walk from end to end on a hot, late summer afternoon whereupon the full blossoming of capital is more radiantly displayed. Here’s Brendan O’Connor for the Awl, in partial, below. Guess what street it is? 14th Street! And it makes sense from the residential maze of Stuy Town to bustling Union Square to the tourist trap High Line and post-industrial Meatpacking, there are few streets in Manhattan as diverse as 14th Street.