Chelsea 03

Even the most basic industrial buildings can provide a visual respite. Even though Chelsea and the High Line are going through major changes, it's these most basic of factories and warehouses that founded the modern city and shaped neighborhoods like Chelsea. I love progress, but our past should not be erased.

The Chelsea series features images from the neighborhood of Chelsea and the immediate surrounding area. Most of these images will include sights visible from the High Line and the park itself.

Chelsea is a neighborhood on the West Side of the borough of Manhattan in New York City. The district's boundaries are roughly 14th Street to the south and the Hudson River and West Street to the west, with the northern boundary variously described as 30th Street or 34th Street and the eastern boundary as either Sixth Avenue or Fifth Avenue. Chelsea is also known as one of the centers of the city's art world, with over 200 galleries in the neighborhood. The Chelsea Historic District features significant locations such as the Chelsea Piers (the destination of the doomed RMS Titanic), the Starrett-Lehigh Building, the Hudson Yards, Hotel Chelsea, and the National Biscuit Company (Nabisco). The gentrification of the area is bringing in global high-tech brands such as Google and Samsung and features stunning architecture by Frank Gehry, Shigeru Ban, & Jean Nouvel.

The High Line (also known as High Line Park) is a 1.45-mile-long elevated linear park created on an elevated section of a disused New York Central Railroad spur called the West Side Line, in New York City. Led by landscape architecture firm James Corner Field Operations, the design team reimagined the existing infrastructure as a "living system" that draws from multiple disciplines (including landscape architecture, urban design, and ecology) and has become an icon in contemporary landscape architecture. Inspired by the 3-mile-long Promenade plantée (tree-lined walkway), a similar project in Paris completed in 1993, the High Line has been redesigned and planted as an aerial greenway and rails-to-trails park. Its success has pushed cities nationwide to reimagine obsolete infrastructure as public space, including the new 606 Trail (Bloomingdale Trail) in Chicago.