High Line Entrance Gansevoort and Washington

You are standing at the Gansevoort Street entrance, the historic southern starting point of the High Line. Before this was a tranquil park, the neighborhood around you was a perilous industrial corridor. In the early twentieth century, Tenth Avenue earned the grim nickname Death Avenue because freight trains traveling at street level frequently collided with pedestrians and vehicles. To resolve this, the city constructed an elevated railway that officially opened in 1934, lifting the heavy freight traffic thirty feet into the air and away from the bustling street life below.