The Flyover & 26th Street Viewing Spur: The Treetop Canopy

Why is it significant?

Walk up the gentle ramp of the High Line Flyover between Twenty-Fifth and Twenty-Seventh Streets. Feel how the metal grated walkway lifts you eight feet above the historic rail deck, suspending you directly within a dense green canopy of sumac, sassafras, and serviceberry trees.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Walk up the gentle ramp of the High Line Flyover between Twenty-Fifth and Twenty-Seventh Streets. Feel how the metal grated walkway lifts you eight feet above the historic rail deck, suspending you directly within a dense green canopy of sumac, sassafras, and serviceberry trees.

Why did the landscape architects build a walkway above the walkway? In this narrow two-block section, the viaduct narrows considerably. Rather than paving over the ground for pedestrian crowds, designers elevated the walking path on slender steel pilotis, allowing a continuous forest floor of ferns, mosses, and woodland groundcover to thrive uninterrupted underneath.

Look to your right at the Twenty-Sixth Street Viewing Spur. It preserves an original industrial rail siding where trains once parked to load raw goods into local factories. Designers framed the historic view with an enormous rectangular steel frame that mimics a giant billboard, but instead of advertising consumer products, it frames the simple, breathtaking architecture of the Manhattan skyline.

Walk slowly and look down through the metal mesh beneath your feet: you can see delicate white flowering dogwoods and woodland perennials thriving in the shade, completely detached from the frantic asphalt city below.