I have to admit that I didn't have high hopes for the Highline--too many rehabbed industrial sites wind up as patchy city parks with gaudily painted girders, the occasional swingset and the uncomfortable sense that under a thin layer of topsoil lie years of toxic waste. And yet it is critical for our cities' well being that we find a way to preserve elements of their industrial fabric in the post-industrial age—not only for their historical value but for the beauty of their craftsmanship, the scale on which they were built and the vistas, both literal and metaphorical, they give us access to. London's Tate Modern is a prime example: A vast, outsized, defunct power station becomes a vast, outsized, vibrant museum with a turbine hall so large it inspires artworks such as Olafur Eliasson's artificial sun, which seemed to create its own apocalyptic weather within the hall's five stories and 36,600 square feet of floorspace.

The Highline Park is built on the elevated rail line that from 1934 until as late as 1980 served to deliver cattle, milk and produce directly inside the the slaughterhouses and other businesses it served. Since then, it has accumulated weeds and a following of urban explorers who helped build the argument for its preservation, of whom two, the writer Joshua David and the painter Robert Hammond, founded Friends of the Highline in 1999 to advocate for its reuse. They convinced the Bloomberg administration and on June 8 a ribbon-cutting ceremony was held to inaugurate the first stretch of the line, running about six blocks, from Gansevoort Street to West 20th.

I visited on the stormy day it opened to the public and from the approach it felt like I was heading up to catch an overland subway train.

But as soon as I reached the top of the stairs, the scale of the project confronted me quite literally. All 19 stories of the Standard Hotel loomed ahead, straddling the Highline as if stuck in mid-stiltwalk on its way to the Hudson.

The plants and trees you see were selected to match the native and wild-seeded flora that had taken over the rail line. Over 100 species of the original plants were catalogued as the renovation got underway and those now in the park are cultivated varieties of the same species, something of an apt metaphor for the entire Highline which feels like the more cultivated and sleeker—not to say slicker—cousin of its former self. Gardener Ashley Burke pointed out to me just a few of the native species here, including thimbleweed, the hop tree, the fringe tree and sassafrass. The plants rise up between rails that have been set back in an approximation of their former footprint and rest on ties without a smear of creosote on them.

With its canny angles and turns, the Highline seems to contain more more than its narrow and limited stretch should allow. It opens up mazes that pedestrians can see but briefly from street level and only if they're willing to risk standing in the middle of 9th avenue.

At its most creative, it offers possibilities you wouldn't have imagined from a park, much less a city street, the most whimsical of which is an amphitheater that floats above streetlevel yet below the Highline itself, giving you the chance, should you wish, to eat lunch and watch the track flow north beneath you while glass windows cut out sounds and fumes, leaving just the visual spectacle and the aroma of your meal.

In a way, it's somewhat astounding to see a park with so many unique features, such as its own artificial wetland flooded by a horizontal fountain, opening in this straitened era. It's a sign that we can build more than the temporary, throwaway structures that have blighted much of the country. This was money—and a lot of it, some $152 million—well spent back at a time when much greater sums vanished leaving us with nothing at all appreciate. Other cities should take note that stimlulus can come in many forms and  that  the chance to let their historical framework find new, even strange, vitality shouldn't be tossed aside.