When it comes to disused elevated rail lines radically remade into elevated urban garden paths, Paris and New York lead the way. Today, the Manhattan exemplar, the High Line, is the more visited, celebrated, and criticized, but the Parisian one got there first, with Le Promenade Plantee opening in 1998, more than a decade before the first segment of the High Line opened in 2009. Paris is still, from its core to its extremities, a city of'firsts', in public space as in much else, determined to do morethan live off its heritage as the capital of the nineteenth century. New York, after first rediscovering the value of its streets and sidewalks, has been equally determined to demonstrate that its urban identity is not petrified into nostalgia for its heady time as the presumptive capital of the twentieth century. Even before the first stroke of design intent, redundant (no longer useful) elevated railways like this have unique character: they are both disengaged and urban, a place apart and a place connected. The design decisions about access, plants, materials, restoration, exploit and enrich this inherent tension.
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