The High Line was finished recently, in 2014, but the railroad tracks that it is built on have been around for much longer.
Trains ran through the West Side of Manhattan for more than a decade before the start of the Civil War. They originally ran street-level along 10th Avenue, very close to pedestrians and horse-drawn carriages, which resulted in many accidents. These accidents often resulted in death, leading 10th Avenue to become known as “Death Avenue.”
This led to the West Side Cowboys. These cowboys were men on horses who rode in front of trains waving red warning flags. They were well-known not only by New Yorkers during this time, but by many others as Mario Puzo mentions them in the opening paragraph of his The Fortunate Pilgrim:
[Larry Angeluzzi] swung his red lantern in a great arc; sparks flew from the iron hoofs of his horse as they rang on the railroad tracks, set flush in the stones of Tenth Avenue, and slowly following horse, rider and lantern came the long freight train, inching its way north from St. John’s Park terminal on Hudson Street (1).
Then in 1929, city, state, and New York Central Railroad officials decided to eliminate the ground level crossings. In 1934, as part of the West Side Improvement Project, the High Line opened.
The original High Line was an elevated train track that ran through the center of the block. While it was being built, the factories and warehouses of the Meatpacking District were undergoing renovations to move shipping docks to upper floors so that goods could “come and go without causing street-level congestion.”
This new railroad was heavily used until after World War Two, when manufacturing began to move away from urban centers. By 1961, most of the southern part of the High Line had been demolished and in 1980, the last train ran on the high line carrying three cars of frozen turkeys for Thanksgiving.
