Highline Park

From the right spot,

(12th Street & Gansevoort works)

There's an historical view of the great city's

Evolution from 1860.

Slave ships and slaughter houses

Coexisted for 150 years before the arches,

30 feet off the ground,

Became home to railroad deliveries

Maybe a clever developer 

Saw a fast buck to be made 

By selling the collapsing unused tracks

To a city hungering for park sites?

Now, while wild greens add to recovered space,

Retailers who can posit name recognition,

Offer cool by understating their presence

With small iconic signs on stores beneath the park.

Surely some higher power 

Must have intervened in preventing 

The last slaughter house from leaving the street below,

It is the veal processing plant that gives the space its authenticity.