New York's New Edge

New York is always cooking up something new.  Halle and Tiso home in on that city’s Far West Side, site of three recent urban cultural developments:  creating, in Chelsea, the largest commercial art gallery district in the world, turning a disused above-ground rail line into the High Line (now the city’s most visited park), and wrestling with big plans to develop the Hudson Yards (the largest unbuilt site in Manhattan) and renovating Penn Station (to become Moynihan Station, the busiest train station in America).   The Bloomberg Administration sees all of this as key elements of an urban model that balances growth and preservation.  A mix of old and new buildings, advocated by pioneer urbanist Jane Jacobs as a key to vibrant neighborhoods, turns out to be in accord with the concept of a "layered” city advanced by contemporary architects.  The narrative in these case studies is incredibly rich, broadly ranging from the Gansevoort Market District, no longer a site for meatpacking but home to super-trendy designer stores, to the battle over the New York Sports and Convention Center, to ethnographic explorations of entrepreneurial galleries in Chelsea (such as Gagosian and Matthew Marks), to reconsideration of why people collect art (not so much for financial grain as for the way it resonates with ongoing issues in their lives), to the now-fabled High Line and its developing milieu of "starchitect”-designed condos.