The High Line New York City
Perhaps no other early 21st century adaptive reuse project better personifies the seismic and cascading implications of redeveloping post-industrial landscapes than that of the High Line, a mile and a half elevated linear park located in New York City’s Chelsea neighbourhood. The transformative impact of the High Line at both the neighbourhood and city levels remains unparalleled, due in no small part to New York’s premier global financial and cultural standing. The project has been heralded as a exemplar public-private partnership that created a public park by repurposing a derelict industrial artifact. However, who is benefitting from the High Line’s economic successes has increasingly come under scrutiny, along with more critical consideration of the High Line’s design and its cultural and social implications. If the High Line is a win-win, who exactly is winning?
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right:
The High Line Park
upper: Photo © Dansnguyen, 2012
bottom: [Photo © Joel Sternfeld, 2000 - wilding of the imagination}
The Distillery District Toronto, Ontario
Right up there with the CN Tower, the Royal Ontario Museum and Ripley’s Aquarium, Toronto, Ontario’s “very hip” Distillery District is identified by several tourism websites as being among the city's top 10 tourist destinations, and as an “industrial neighbourhood with a modern, contemporary twist” (Osojnik, 2023).
In the early 19th century, Gooderham and Worts served as a proud symbol of the ambition and progress of the growing industrial city and its emerging business elite. When the industrial alcohol production ended and the distillery closed down in 1990, the 5-hectare site located adjacent to the east downtown immediately became the locale for a new redevelopment approach, one that fused industrial heritage with the arts, akin to the culture-led redevelopment strategies that continue to be actively pursued in post-industrial cities across the global North.
right:
Gooderhan and Worts
1896 Painting, Painter Unknown
