A new elevated pedestrian bridge will lead High Line visitors straight to the Moynihan Train Hall.
Photo by Max Parrott
Friends of the High Line will open a new elevated pedestrian bridge on Wednesday to provide a path directly from Moynihan Train Hall to the rest of the linear park.
Though the span of the project is only about two blocks, the design and architecture of the foot bridge was thoughtfully conceived as a sister project to the existing park. It consists of a lushly planted, rustic Woodland Bridge that runs above West 30th Street from the High Line’s Spur, and a Timber Bridge, built from Alaskan Yellow Cedar beams suspended above Dyer Avenue.
The $50 million project was funded by a private-public partnership between Empire State Development, Brookfield Properties and Friends of the High Line.
At its northern point, the bridge opens onto Magnolia Court, a quiet pedestrian plaza at the foot of the Manhattan West towers abutting Moynihan Train Hall and Hudson Yards.
“From a transit access perspective, it lets people from Moynihan walk uninterrupted down to the West Village via the High Line. From a public space perspective, it ties all these spaces together,” said Patrick Hazari, senior director of planning, design and construction at Friends of the High Line.
The area below the connector was long-known for having a poor pedestrian streetscape, where traffic often backed up from the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel. Now pedestrians will have a seamless entrance to the elevated path.
Like the rest of the linear park, its designers were very exacting about the architecture and ecology of the new project, but with a twist. The decision to build a wooden truss bridge portion of the path was meant to stand in contrast to the rail-adapted spans of the High Line. The Woodland Bridge Section features an especially dense canopy of plans — a result of having a deeper planting bed.
“It had to be related to the High Line, but also it needed to sort of…
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