High Line (Succession / I Am Legend)

You’re standing on a railroad that refused to die — thirty feet above the street, walking tracks that once fed the Meatpacking District and, before the park existed, starred in a zombie apocalypse.

The Scene

Long before tourists and gelato carts, the High Line was a rusting elevated rail line — exactly what I Am Legend (2007) needed. Filming ran September 2006 to March 2007, two years before the park opened, when the structure was still a derelict freight viaduct draped in self-seeded wildflowers. Robert Neville (Will Smith) and his dog Sam hunt beneath the line at West 14th Street and 10th Avenue, where Neville finds a “hive” of the infected and rigs a trap to capture one alive for his vaccine experiments. The crew imported weeds from Florida to sell the overgrown look — the real rails barely needed the help.

Succession filmed even closer. For Season 3, the production based itself at The Shed at 30 Hudson Yards, right beside the High Line near West 28th Street. And the park’s 10th Avenue Overlook at 17th Street — wooden bleachers facing a cut-out window over the traffic below — is the kind of vantage point where a Roy-family power talk feels inevitable.

The Backstory

The High Line was born from bloodshed on asphalt. In the 1800s, street-level freight trains on 10th Avenue killed hundreds of pedestrians — it earned the name “Death Avenue” — until the 1930s West Side Improvement elevated the New York Central’s line above the streets. Trains thundered through warehouses and meatpackers until the last freight run in 1980. Then the viaduct sat rusting, slated for demolition.

In 1999, locals Joshua David and Robert Hammond founded Friends of the High Line to save it. Photographer Joel Sternfeld’s moody 2000–2001 portraits of the weed-choked rails — published as Walking the High Line — turned public opinion. The park opened in June 2009, designed by James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro with planting designer Piet Oudolf, who took inspiration from the wild landscape that had colonized the abandoned tracks. Sections two and three followed in 2011 and 2014. Today it’s a 1.45-mile public park the city owns and Friends of the High Line maintains.

What to Look For

• The 10th Avenue Overlook (17th St): tiered wooden seating facing a giant window over the traffic below — the High Line’s built-in theater.
• Original rails and ties embedded into the planting beds and walkways — ghost tracks under your feet.
• Oudolf’s meadow plantings: grasses and perennials echoing what grew here when the line was abandoned.
• The Standard Hotel (13th St): it literally straddles the park — the line passes straight through the building.
• Hudson River views from the 30th–34th Street Rail Track Walks.
• Rotating public art and food vendors near the Gansevoort entrance.

Getting There

Free and open daily; hours change with the season (roughly early morning to late evening in summer, shorter in winter — check thehighline.org). Access: Gansevoort Street (elevator, at the Whitney Museum), 14th, 16th, 17th, 23rd, 26th Streets, 28th Street (ramp), 30th Street at 11th Avenue (stairs and elevator), and the 34th Street ramp. Subway: A/C/E/L to 14th Street–8th Avenue for the southern half, C/E to 23rd Street for Chelsea, or the 7 to 34th Street–Hudson Yards for the northern end.

Trivia

• Before elevation, “West Side cowboys” rode horseback ahead of the trains on Death Avenue, waving flags to warn pedestrians.
• The last train crossed in 1980; the viaduct then sat unused for nearly 30 years.
• Sternfeld’s 2000–2001 photographs of the abandoned line helped convince New Yorkers the rails were worth saving.
• In 1984, the Art of Noise video “Close (to the Edit)” was shot on the derelict High Line.
• Since opening, the park has hosted scenes in Louie (2011), Girls, What Maisie Knew, and the Simpsons episode “Moonshine River” (2012).

The Hunt Clue

Where freight once rumbled over cobbled stone,
The weeds grew wild and claimed the line their own.
Smith laid his trap beneath at Fourteenth and Tenth —
Then climb and watch the world from the Overlook’s bench.

Photo by Dansnguyen via Wikimedia Commons CC0 1.0