The High Line Is Finally Finished

For the first time since it opened in 2009, construction on the High Line will be finished. Photo: Jimin Kim/SOPA Images/Shutterstock It’s been 17 years since the High Line opened, with subsequent phases of the elevated park unfurling to the northern terminus at 34th Street. Chelsea and the entire West Side have transformed in that time — starchitect-designed towers now huddle around the rail park and the enclave of Hudson Yards looms up at its end — but gardens often take longer to develop than buildings. And now the last stretch of the High Line’s garden, in a 34th Street section known as the Rail Yard Preserve, is finally finished. The garden, by Dutch landscape designer Piet Oudolf, will open next month. Workers planting the 34th Street garden. Photo: Timothy Schenck/Courtesy of the High Line/TIMOTHY SCHENCK 2026 “When the 34th Street garden opens, the entire High Line will be open and there will not be a construction shed anywhere on it for the first time in anybody’s memory,” Richard Hayden, the High Line’s senior director of horticulture, told the New York Times, which first reported the news. The 2,561 square feet of planting beds will be done in the same naturalistic style as the rest of the 1.5-mile-long park, which was also designed by Oudolf: sedges, grasses, and Heuchera villosa “Autumn Bride,” a species of coral bells with white flowers that rise above velvety light-green leaves in late summer and early fall. In all, there will be 52 different types of shrubs and trees planted by Field Operations, the landscape design team that worked with Oudolf on the rest of the High Line. This garden will be the only section of the park planted in-ground — everything else is elevated, planted in 18-inch soil. The setting is far from bucolic, however: There’s a huge parking lot to one side and a road on the other. But the juxtaposition of calming greenery in a gritty urban setting is quintessentially High Line. The new section, in the Rail Yard Preserve, is narrow and the only part of the 1.5-mile garden planted in the ground, rather than 18 inches of soil on the elevated tracks. Photo: Timothy Schenck/Courtesy of the High Line/TIMOTHY SCHENCK 2026 The Rail Yard Preserve, the section of the park that runs from 30th to 34th Streets, between Eleventh and Twelfth Avenues, originally had only minimal plantings and maintenance, according to Friends of the High Line — weeding, basically, not the “curated intervention” that made the rest of the park feel so lush. Now the 34th Street entrance will not only be planted out, it will include improved signage at Twelfth Avenue to make it feel more welcoming to visitors. In addition to the 34th Street garden, the Prairie Terrace at 17th Street will reopen after being shrouded in scaffolding for nine years because of construction alongside it. The new plantings have been selected for their suitability with the sunlight patterns that changed with the construction and include blackhawks big bluestem, great globe thistle, sea holly, and black-eyed Susans. Like the other gardens, also designed by Piet Oudolf, this one is naturalistic, conveying a sense of urban wildness. Photo: Timothy Schenck/Courtesy of the High Line/TIMOTHY SCHENCK 2026 The High Line Is Finally Finished Your product is saved! You’ll receive emails when your saved products go on sale. Manage preferences.