The Tiffany Overlook: Where Rails Sliced into Factories

Why is it significant?

Walk up the stairway onto the timber boardwalk of the Tiffany and Company Foundation Overlook and gaze southward down the canyon of Gansevoort Street. Feel the open breeze blowing off the Hudson River just two blocks west.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Walk up the stairway onto the timber boardwalk of the Tiffany and Company Foundation Overlook and gaze southward down the canyon of Gansevoort Street. Feel the open breeze blowing off the Hudson River just two blocks west. You are standing thirty feet in the air at the southern terminus of the preserved park.

Did the railway originally end right here? No: in nineteen thirty-four, the tracks continued five blocks farther south all the way to the Saint John's Park freight terminal on Spring Street. But in nineteen sixty, the southern section was demolished as highway trucking grew, slicing through the steel bridge and leaving this dramatic cliff-edge overlook.

Look down at the wooden decking beneath your sneakers: notice how the planks taper into concrete combs that allow self-seeding prairie grasses and birch trees to sprout directly between the old steel rails. Landscape architect James Corner and Dutch plantsman Piet Oudolf designed these beds using wild perennials that mirror the hardy, self-sown ecosystem that grew wild on the derelict tracks during thirty years of abandonment.

As yellow taxi cabs hum below on the asphalt, look at the weathered steel girders stamped with the names of long-defunct Pennsylvania iron foundries from the nineteen thirties. This overlook proves that urban ruin can be transformed into living poetry.