Begin/End High Line Park

Before this became a popular elevated park, the tracks were known as Death Avenue. In the early twentieth century, freight trains rumbled along the street level here to service the factories of the West Side, leading to hundreds of fatal accidents with pedestrians. To stop the carnage, the city built this massive elevated steel structure in the nineteen thirties, lifting the trains thirty feet into the air and allowing them to pull directly into the second stories of warehouses and manufacturing plants.