High Line phone audio tour connects with park’s fans

Volume Number 1 Issue Number 3 | October 13 - 19, 2006

Chelsea Now photo by Lawrence Lerner

A sign for the audio tour at a point along the elevated railway, which is being converted into a park.

By Lawrence Lerner

At the southern tip of the High Line railway viaduct, on the corner of Washington and Gansevoort Sts., construction workers in orange hardhats, fluorescent vests and work boots scurry to and fro above one of the last remains of the old Meatpacking District, a strip of loading docks where men in white coats speaking foreign tongues shuffle boxes of meat on and off the platforms.

Amid the hustle and bustle and construction debris is a tiny bright-green rectangular sign sitting high up on the beige stucco exterior of 820 Washington St., where a deserted meat plant is now home to the laborers working on the High Line. Hung just a few feet away from a large black debris chute swooping down the side of the building into a dumpster from the rail line above, the little sign unceremoniously kicks off what some are calling a cultural experience not to be missed: a High Line cell-phone audio tour stretching more than 15 blocks, through three neighborhoods along the West Side of Manhattan, including Chelsea.

Sponsored by Friends of the High Line, the nonprofit organization founded in 1999 to transform the rail viaduct into an elevated park, the cell-phone tour consists of stops at 14th, 15th, 17th, 22nd, 25th, 26th and 30th Sts. — along both Washington St. and Tenth Ave. — where phone numbers on the bright-green signs beckon passersby to call and hear messages by project architects and celebrity Friends of the High Line, including Glenn Close, Kevin Bacon and Diane von Furstenberg.

“We’re looking at all the different ways we can involve all sorts of people in the High Line,” said Joshua David, FOHL co-founder. “We’re trying to keep people engaged in the park even though it’s not opening for two years. With the cell-phone tour, people can learn about and feel a sense of connection to the project as it moves toward completion.”

The High Line tour, which runs through Oct. 31, kicked off last Saturday and Sunday as part of the fourth annual Open House New York weekend, which opens nearly 200 architectural sites throughout the city to the public. Friends of the High Line ushered nearly 1,300 people into the former meatpacking facility at 820 Washington St. during the two-day event, offering them a glimpse of what will be the southern starting point of the raised rail-park from a third-floor loading dock, complete with a short lecture given by the organization’s volunteers.

“We had a captive audience and were able to tell a lot of people about the cell-phone audio tour,” said Katie Lorah, the Friends’ media manager.

Not surprisingly, numbers for the tour from the opening weekend were encouraging. The system was called 1,200 times, with 80 people completing the entire tour, according to Lorah.

“Needless to say, we don’t expect to sustain that pace throughout the month, but I would encourage people to check it out,” she said.

On Thursday morning, a test run through the guided tour proved exhilarating, offering this participant the feel of traveling through living history. But it was also a little confusing, in that the signs, which are quite small and hang on both High Line pillars and buildings, are difficult to spot. A couple had even gone missing.

“One building owner took a sign down because of miscommunication,” said Lorah. “We’re making sure to get that back up, but in the meantime, if any are missing, we encourage people to get the tour itinerary from our Web site and make the call from the spot anyway. The tour still works either way.”

The idea for the cell-phone tour came from Scott Lauer, the architect and past FOHL member who founded Open House New York. According to David, Lauer is “always looking for new ways to engage people in the Open House New York weekend, and we were very excited about the idea because it allows people to move through the High Line on their own, learning about its history and the history of surrounding buildings through voices of people who are great supporters of this project.”

Celebrity chef Tom Colicchio is one of those people. The talent behind the restaurant Craft and its spinoffs, including Craft Steak, located along the High Line on Tenth Ave. and 15th St., Colicchio is a longtime supporter of FOHL and the audio-tour voice at the tour’s Chelsea Market stop.

“I thought it was a great idea. I’d never seen it done before, a tour that you can do on your own with your cell phone to get info on buildings and what’s going on with the project,” said Colicchio, who offers a history of the building housing Craft Steak in his tour segment.

Anne Pasternak, president and artistic director of Creative Time, a nonprofit specializing in public-art exhibitions, also participated in the project. Her voice kicks off the tour at 820 Washington St.

“Anne was the perfect person for 820 Washington, given her prior involvement with this spot,” said David, referring to FOHL’s 2005 collaboration with Creative Time on a public art show called “The Plain of Heaven” at the old meat plant.

Pasternak, who has supported FOHL since its inception, also sees great value in the project, focusing, like Colicchio, on the novel use of technology.

“I love the idea of the phone tour,” she said. “People are simply glued to their personal computing and telephone devices, but now there are simple and direct ways of sharing information as we travel about our environment, from on-the-go, online satellite maps to this accessible means of learning the history of a site. So, I love that people can experience the city and the High Line in this new way.”

David and his staff at FOHL are grateful for the support that local community leaders and luminaries have lent to the project, taking busy schedules into account when enlisting their aid.

“These folks are incredibly generous with their time and money, and we try to limit what we ask of them, given the demands on their time,” said David, who simplified the recording process intentionally. “All they had to do was record a voicemail message into a landline. We didn’t need to book them at a recording studio. They could just do it from any phone, whenever they wanted.”

Colicchio says he would have participated in the project no matter how much trouble it was.

“This city is so rich in history. It’s great to be a part of the ground floor of this,” he said. “I’ll look back on it in 50 years and say, ‘Wow, I remember being a part of this. How cool was that.’ ”

A map and details of the Friends of the High Line cell-phone tour are available at www.thehighline.org.