Repurposing the High Line: Aesthetic Experience and Contradiction in West Chelsea

• In Event: 465 - Section on Consumers and Consumption Paper Session. Luxury, Class, and Consumption

Abstract

Because the deployment of aesthetic experience – both discursively and materially – is so central to urban development today, it is crucial for urban scholars to examine the aesthetic dimension of urban transformation. My research on the High Line Park and the surrounding neighborhood of New York’s West Chelsea district explores what the High Line means as social, aesthetic, ideological and spatial artifact; what it does as an object of aesthetic apprehension and how power, inequality,inclusion and exclusion and identity are produced and reproduced through the design strategies and aesthetic discourses that are deployed in the repurposing of this defunct industrial artifact. Specifically, I investigate through an analysis of field-notes, images and textual documents the manner in which the High Line orchestrates visitors’ perception of the city; how choices about what to preserve and what to obscure from the industrial past shape our understanding of history, and how new additions to the sites such as plantings, public art, water features, and amphitheaters communicate to visitors how they are to interact with each other, who “belongs,” who to exclude or fear and with whom to identify. I conclude that the High Line guides visitors toward a highly aestheticized experience of the surrounding neighborhood but occludes understanding of the material phenomenon that undergird its transformation to an art district and tourist shopping hub, as well as the reality of the low-income residents who share the neighborhood with the new urban elite for whom the neighborhood has been transformed.

Author

• Julia H. Rothenberg, City University of New York-Queensborough Community College