Jonquil starts off her visits to the High Line by stopping in the Lobby Gallery at the Whitney Museum. Located to the right of the elevators, as you face them, the Lobby Gallery is open to the public, free of charge. Unlike the rest of the Whitney today, but like the Whitney used to be when it first opened in Greenwich Village in 1931.

The Lobby Gallery is currently showing an exhibit featuring US artists “whose work responds to the precarious state of the environment through a personal lens.” Jonquil is taken by this sculpture by Lena Henke called Dead Horse Bay, which “explor[es] the transformative and destructive effect that city planner Robert Moses . . . had on New York in the mid-twentieth century.”

She contemplates this painting by Torkwase Dyson, whose work “reflects on how infrastructural policies and design can alter the environment.”

The Lobby Gallery is small but exhausting so she heads for the narrow green spaces provided by the High Line. Not that this is particularly relaxing.

The High Line is built on old disused train tracks but Jonquil feels no sense of nostalgia here.

The New York she sees from the High Line is hurtling towards the future with no looking back.

Jonquil reads that Hudson Yards is the “New Heart of New York.”

Well that’s quite a claim! she thinks. Right now, this part of the city doesn’t look like New York to her at all. She assumes that at some point this part of the skyline will be recognizable as NYC, but how long will that take?

How long before people say, oh, you’re going to NYC? Well, you just have to make sure to climb the Vessel!

It’s pleasant here near the river. It’s not a neighborhood yet, it’s a construction site with a lot of high-minded claims, but Jonquil is curious to see it become one.

Jonquil is made from an old t-shirt. Her blouse is from a silk necktie, and her jeans from a denim shirt. Her elephant messenger bag is cut from a dress outgrown by Jennie’s daughter. Her espadrilles are made from grosgrain ribbon and, my favorite part, the soles are dried-up facial cleanser pads. They still smell vaguely medicinal.

New York, like a scene from all those movies,
But you’re real enough to me,
There’s a heart
A heart that lives in New York
A heart in New York
A rose on the street
I write my song to that city heartbeat

—Simon and Garfunkel