Wilderness in the Big City

I live outside Philadelphia, but for the beginning of this Thanksgiving break, my roommate from Kentucky and I are visiting Brooklyn and NYC. My roommate has never been to NY before. Today, we walked from Brooklyn to the Chelsea Markets. At the end of the day, we walked across the High Line - a public park built on the historic freight rail line above the streets on Manhattan's West side. Walking across it, you can see the old rail line tracks through the plants and shrubs that are planted throughout. It's such a creative and unique idea to preserve a decrepit railway by building a park around it. 

This idea reminded me of the talk on tourism and development in the Adirondack park that we've had in the last week or two. I found it interesting in that instead of developing the tracks more into a museum or or some kind of piece of art, or even completely ripping it out and building high rises, the city has decided to revert back to a sort of "wild" environment (I put wild in quotes because the greenery that occupies the rail line in NY would hardly be considered wild compared to the Adirondacks). In a way, its a reverse situation to what occurs in the Adirondacks - instead of developing wild forest land into tourism areas (in the Adirondacks), the developed city scape of NYC is being developed into a public park. Although the High Line park can't really be compared to 'outdoorsy' nature of the Adirondacks, I couldn't help but make this comparison.