Before the High Line was a park, it was a solution to a body count.

The first rail tracks on the lower west side ran along 10th and 11th Avenues, south from Penn Station — straight across every east-west street feeding the Hudson waterfront, which was one of the busiest working districts in the country. Trains at street level, dock traffic crossing constantly.

The railroad’s answer was to hire men on horseback to ride ahead of the trains waving warnings. They were called the West Side Cowboys.

It didn’t work. By one 1910 tally, 548 people had been killed and over 1,500 injured along that stretch. Tenth Avenue got a nickname: Death Avenue.

Eventually the pressure produced the West Side Improvement Project. North of Penn Station the line went underground, where it still runs. To the south, they raised it above the street.

The High Line opened in 1934, and the original structure was almost twice as long as what’s left — running from the rail yards at 35th Street down to St. John’s Park Terminal at Spring Street, near where the Holland Tunnel comes in. The West Side Improvement Project it belonged to covered thirteen miles of line. It eliminated 105 street-level crossings and required demolishing 640 buildings. It ran directly through factories and warehouses so trains could load inside.

One of those was the Nabisco factory on Ninth between 15th and 16th. Flour came in by rail, straight into the building. The Oreo was invented there in 1912. You know it now as Chelsea Market.

Demolition of the southern end started in 1960 and worked north. As trucking took over, traffic dropped. The last train ran in 1980 — a load of turkeys to the meatpacking district.

Then it sat abandoned and nature moved in.

The proposal to turn it into a pedestrian trail instead of tearing it down became the thing that changed that whole side of Manhattan. Construction began in 2006.

*New York Minute* is set in July 1977, when the High Line was still partly in operation. William Kane holds court in Vic’s Diner, caddy corner from the stub at Gansevoort and Washington.

This is one of the entries in New York City’s Little Black Book 1: Secrets, History, and Trivia of the World’s Greatest City.

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