UMOUR boys @ The High Line

A short time ago, Mr URS and Loudmouth bill attempted to access the Highline, a very odd blindspot/landmark in New York City. For various reasons, I was unable to attend but instead ended up at The Stone down on Avenue C.

Back back in the 1970s and, I swear, in the early 1980s, I remember seeing the trains of the high line. Unlike Chicago's subway system, these were true-blue freight trains, and I remember thinking "Well that's an odd site seeing a train ooze between buildings like that."

To this day I have wondered what it must have been like to work on that line: Imagine driving such a train into Manhattan and then, as raw hides of beef are being (un)loaded, or new clothes from the Tribecca factories loaded and sent into the hinterland, what must have it been like to be an engineer from, say, Kansas, getting out down on Hudson and walking into a building up at the second or third floor and then walking downstairs to have a pastrami-on-rye or maybe a hot dog? What was it like to walk around in a pre-post-industrial New York and working class downtown Manhattan? To have bumped into a shabbily dressed Pollack or Kerouac or Monk or Parker? (Of course, as a train driver you would likely never have guessed who these men were, but there would have been something solid and memorable about these brief encounters.)

As the high line closed to trains, and perhaps even before, like the Gowanus Canal, the High Line entered our blindspot: You didn't really see it or think about it anymore. It became something that, although incredibly strange in hindsight, you coluld nonetheless block it out and completely forget about it, as it did not fit into the collective image of a richer city that was emerging, or at least was being thrust upon us through the medium of increased rents.

Oh how I hope and pray to return with a complete set of UMOURiators to the scene of their crime with an axe one day and hack open that chain and lock and ascend to the High line and perhaps build a shanty or other perpetual tribute to impermanance.