END OF THE LINE?

An abandoned New York freight railway may be converted into an elevated greensward
BY FREDERIC D. SCHWARZ

IN 1995 JOHN H. WHITE, Jr., whose article on Robert Fulton appears in this issue, wrote in our pages: “The fate of most abandoned railroads is a speedy dismemberment. … The weeds and trees move in, and soon even those who worked on the line can no longer point out just where it ran.” This description was not meant to apply to urban railroads, of course, especially not to elevated lines, whose dismemberment can be as complicated an engineering and logistical problem as their construction.

A case in point is New York City’s High Line, an elevated freight railroad that made its last delivery—three carloads of frozen turkeys, the historical record shows- in 1980. The line was built to relieve surface congestion, and from that standpoint it was a success: When it opened in 1934, after nine years of construction, it eliminated 105 dangerous grade crossings. It also eliminated an endearing anachronism, the “cowboys” who, under the terms of an old law, were required to ride on horseback ahead of street-level freight trains and wave red flags to warn pedestrians of their approach. In addition, its electric engines replaced the last steam locomotives in service in Manhattan.

The High Line was a wonder in its day, but within two decades trucks took over much of the city’s freight traffic, and by the late 1960s the line was essentially a relic. Today all that remains is a one-and-a-half-mile stub. Since its closure, various schemes have been floated for its reuse, as parts of the line have been dismantled and the remainder has slowly deteriorated. Most recently a group called Friends of the High Line has been promoting an urban version of the Rails to Trails scheme, under which derelict rights-of-way are converted to hiking paths. Instead of a trail, FHL pro poses turning the High Line into an elevated park, with flowers, trees, artwork, and an inspiring view of the Hudson River and New Jersey.

While FHL envisions a rus in urbe, opponents of the scheme see only rust in urbe. Inspectors have found dozens of structural violations on the High Line needing repair, and it will cost at least a million dollars just to fix the most urgent ones. Structural soundness aside, business owners in the area, along with many local residents, think the overhead tracks are an eyesore. Besides, will street-oriented New Yorkers climb several flights of stairs to get to a narrow, windy strip of grass? Especially during winter, which encompasses much of the year in New York?

On the other hand, in overbuilt Manhattan, where many cherished neighborhood parks are smaller than a typical back yard and barely contain enough grass to fill a window box, any new green space is welcome. An elevated walkway in Paris that is similar to the one being proposed has proved enormously popular. FHL has attracted a number of prominent supporters, from Mayor Michael Bloomberg to the former Invention & Technology author Sebastian Junger, who owns a restaurant in the area, and the decorating oracle Martha Stewart (who has yet to write for Invention & Technology).

A few visionaries argue for what might be the most radical solution of all: using the derelict railroad as a railroad. Henry Boehm, a local rail historian who once cut his college classes to walk the High Line’s entire length, suggests restoring it for light trolley service. By connecting with a west-ward extension of an existing subway line, it could serve the Jacob Javits Convention Center, the popular Chelsea Piers recreation complex, and the Hudson River ferries, all of which line the riverfront half a mile or so from the nearest subway. The problem with this railsto-rails solution, as usual, is money. Even though it would use existing track, the cost of extending other lines and building the necessary infrastructure would be hard to support in the current budget climate.

FHL estimates the initial cost of conversion to a park at $40 to $60 million and is somewhat vague about where the money might come from. Annual maintenance costs would be another $10 million or so. Removing the line would cost perhaps $15 million but would open the door for real estate developers to make large sums, thus swelling both tax receipts and politicians’ campaign chests.

To an outsider, the controversy might seem odd. What community has ever objected to the removal of elevated train tracks? But New York is one of the very few places where people are actually disappointed when their neighborhoods improve. The city also has a history of drawn-out wrangles over land use: The original erection of the High Line required 350 property deals and the demolition of 640 buildings.

In 1992 the Interstate Commerce Commission issued a conditional demolition order, pending an agreement on sharing the expenses. That proved difficult to negotiate. In late 2001, with Mayor Rudolph Giuliani about to leave office, a deal was sealed to go ahead with the demolition, but in March a judge ruled that the agreement had violated city land-use regulations. Thus the fate of the High Line remains uncertain. The CSX Corporation, which bought the line from Conrail in 1999, has not gone on record for or against any specific plan, and at press time a panel appointed by Mayor Bloomberg was reviewing possible uses.

HISTORY IS COOL

Refrigerators make history as well as ice cubes

SCHOLARS LOVE GRAND IDEAS that neatly tie together everything in history. One of the more intriguing theories of this type comes from Jonathan Coopersmith of Texas A&M, who has written that much of the history of communications, from printing to VCRs to the Internet, was determined by the need to distribute pornography more efficiently. Other historians point out that many of the first buyers of answering machines were prostitutes and that phone-sex lines routed through such countries as Guyana and São Tomé financed much of the telephone infrastructure in the Third World.

None of this is too surprising; sex may as well drive communications technology, since it drives everything else. But if recent news items are any guide, much of technological history actually stems from a different need, one that is nearly as basic and in many cases harder to satisfy: the desire for a nice cold drink. Consider, for example, the report that a chunk of ice “the size of Rhode Island” (a comparison that somehow never sounds as impressive as it’s meant to) has broken off the Antarctic ice shelf. Some scientists attribute this event to global warming caused by destruction of the ozone layer the result of decades of use of flourocarbon propellants. In this way the search for improved refrigeration in the 1920s and 1930s which led to the developments of flourocarbons, may continue to affect global events a century later.

Going a century in the direction, to the early 1800s, we find that Thomas Jefferson experimented with a “refrigerator”—essentially an icebox—after he retired from the Presidency. (Jefferson was always interested in the latest technology; today he would be instant-messaging John Adams.) In the 1830s Frederick Tudor of Boston began shipping ice from New England rivers to India. Besides introducing refrigeration to that steamy land, the ice business became a mainstay of U.S.-lndia trade for several decades to come.

The latest in refrigeration research comes from Karl A. Gschneidner, Jr., of the U.S. Department of Energy’s laboratory in Ames, Iowa. Instead of expanding and compressing a volatile liquid, as occurs in most refrigerators, Gschneidner’s design transfers heat by alternately magnetizing and demagnetizing powdered gadolinium, taking advantage of what is known as the magnetocaloric effect. The news brings to mind a previous attempt at inventing an improved refrigerator by no less a luminary than Albert Einstein. Along with Leo Szilard, who could be called the Kevin Bacon of physics for his connection with virtually every important discovery of the twentieth century, Einstein filed at least 45 patent applications in at least six countries on refrigerating apparatus.

The pair performed their research between the mid-1920s and the early 1930s. First they tried an elegant but complicated gas-liquid mixture as a coolant; next they devised an immersion cooler that used no electricity. Finally they came up with what is still called the Einstein-Szilard pump, in which a varying electromagnetic field causes liquid metal to compress a coolant with no moving parts. All these designs worked, but none of them were practical enough to be commercialized, so the two physicist-inventors went on to other things. Most notable among these was the atom bomb, for which Szilard in 1934 patented the basic idea of a nuclear chain reaction and Einstein in 1939 wrote his famous letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt suggesting what became known as the Manhattan Project.

It’s tempting to speculate how the world might be different today if Szilard’s refrigeration ideas had proved practical and his chain reaction had not (although the EinsteinSzilard pump was invaluable for cooling the world’s first atomic pile). In fact, we’ll venture to say that just about every major historical event of the last two centuries has some sort of cooling apparatus involved if you look hard enough, though in some cases it can be as tough as finding a jar of pimientos way in the back of a crowded refrigerator shelf. It all goes to show that there’s a lot more history in your refrigerator than last month’s leftover fried rice.

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