High Line Section Three： Groundbreaking Ceremony： Q&A)

How would you describe the perspective you get of the city from this wild elevation? This is not a place where you're going to see lots of wild animals. You're not going to play baseball. You're not going to have a cricket pitch or whatever. This is what the city is about, presented in ways in terms of nature. And it shows the city is not just steel and concrete, but it's nature and people. And to me, this is just so different and so wonderful. I don't think you should have every park raised any more than I think you should have every park look like Central Park. Having a diversity of parks is great. Other questions? Yes, sir. Mark Doyle. I'd like you to reflect if your voice was more than kind. I think more than anything, it was the people that thought it was a great idea. I mean, I'd love to tell you that I'm the most creative and visionary. I am not. But what I've always tried to do is to find very smart people who think outside the box and listen very carefully when they say something and not get disappointed when their ideas don't turn out to be great. Not everything is going to work. If you ski and you never fall, you're not skiing very hard. You're not taking the right slopes. And I think that's true in innovation in lots of things. You're going to have failures. Failures are useful because they show you a path you shouldn't go down in the future. But failures tell you that those people generally are trying new things. So when, you know, these two guys and Barry and Diane and Amanda and Adrian Benepe and Patty said, you know, this is a great idea, even if it sounds strange, you sit back and you just get those preconceived notions out of your mind and you just take a fresh canvas and look at it. And whether it's the Saffron Gates in Central Park that took this city roughly 25 years to get around to doing or Christopher Columbus, which is a new thing, and it's in the front page of the Great New York Post today. And everybody, people resist change, all of us. And what gets us going are people that have a vision. And not everybody has a vision for everything. But I think my evolution was my first time I remember was just the people talking about it. Yes, sir. Dave Seifman, New York Post. Is there an estimate of how many visitors are coming to the High Line? And is there a capacity issue? Just looking at my notes, 10 million people since it opened in 2009. And, you know, this is the kind of thing that every visitor that comes here goes home and tells their neighborhood, whether their neighborhood's across town or across the world, about it. So it's one of those things that you would think could keep growing. Yes, there are limits to how many people could be up here and there's safety limits, but that generally is not a problem. And one of the nice things about this park is in the winter you have to bundle up, but it's as fun in the winter as it is in the summer. You just sort of walk, and to say it's bracing is a little understating. It can get awfully cold and windy, but then you're doing it, and somehow or other it's part of the city. Yes, sir. Matt Chavin, New York Observer. There have been some complaints recently, I think most notably a New York Times op-ed, that the High Line is sort of changing Chelsea, Disney-fying it, maybe ruining it a little. I was wondering if you had any thoughts on that. You know, cities that don't change, if we didn't change Midtown, Central Park would be a shanty town like it was for many, many years. If we didn't embrace new technologies or medicines, life expectancy would be back when we're 25 years old. There's a great cartoon I have at home of two cavemen sitting around a fire in a cave, and one says to the other, I don't get it. We breathe clean air, we drink pure water, all our food's organic, we get plenty of exercise, and we die at age 25. You have to keep changing. That's what improves our lives and makes it more interesting. And cities have to evolve. We have a constant influx of people from around the world. The population of this city and the needs of the people that are here change. Today families are staying here because the schools are better, so we have a challenge all of a sudden of providing more activities for more kids than we used to have before and more classroom seats. People from around the world want to come here. There's always a challenge of how you keep affordable housing and build housing that the marketplace says it's more and more valuable because more and more people want to come. We have to find a way, and we do that. We have the largest affordable housing program ever in this country, and it's getting done, almost done now. We are planting a million trees. Who would have thought? You know, before we ripped all the trees down for firewood and Manhattan, the Dutch had just arrived, we had plenty of trees, so we've come full cycle. It may have taken us 400 years, but we've come full cycle. You've got to keep changing, and that's what's great about New York. And I gave a speech at the Economic Club last week, and I compared two states just to show you what change can mean, South Carolina and North Carolina, two great states. I have lots of friends in both of them. But South Carolina has focused on trying to maintain its old industries. North Carolina focused on building a world-class education system and bringing technology in. North Carolina has something like 11 corporate headquarters, and South Carolina has one. North Carolina has, you know, a better tax base and that sort of thing. So you've got to keep changing. We'll take one or two more questions on topic. Yes, sir. We'll get the microphone to you. Hi, Zachary Steber from the Epoch Times. I'm wondering if the design that was unveiled in March, if it's changed at all since then. Is there any changes to the original design? Basically the same. You know, as they build, they're going to find you have to work around something. There's always projects, but no. This is for Barry Diller and Dion von Furstenberg. Did you give your first big donation sight unseen here? Did you come up and look at it? And if so, do you ever stroll on it and think about, do you ever have a buyer's remorse? Yes to both, no to the last. Not only do I not have buyer's remorse, I can't wait for the next project. I just wanted to ask you to reflect for a minute here at the end of the event. What is it, do you think, that has made the High Line such a successful venture? What makes it such a successful venture? It's different. Everything about it. Yeah, everything about it. I speak for the expert. I'll leave it at that. I'm just much too smart to ever add on to anything she says.