New designs for sections of the High Line Park under construction in West Chelsea were released today and indicate that some of its features will include an elevated snack bar over a large plaza at 18th Street at the base of a broad staircase rising to the elevated park, an exposed section of girders that can be viewed from above, a portal along an edge of the park in the shape of a large billboard, an elevated section, called Woodland Flyover, where one can walk above tall plantings and a wading water feature between 14th and 15th Streets.

The first section from Gansevoort Street to 20th Street is scheduled to open by the end of the year and the second section from 20th to 30th Streets) is scheduled to open by the end of 2009.

"The High Line represents the things we want New York City to be: bold, innovative, and environmentally sustainable," declared Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg in a statement distributed at a news conference announcing the new designs at the new headquarters of the Friends of the High Line at 520 West 20th Street. "Standing 29 feet in the air and stretching 22 blocks, it will provide vital open space - among the most important goals of PlanNYC, our vision of a greener, greater new York. The High Line will be a one-of-a-kind park in our one-of-a-kind city; like so much of what we do here, it will be a model and an inspiration for others around the world," he said.

Joshua David and Robert Hammond founded Friends of the High Line a few years ago and eventually were able to secure $98 million from the city, $22 million from the federal government, and $250,000 from New York State towards the park's estimated final cots of about $170 million.

City Planning Commissioner Amanda M. Burden said that "we are here today to announce the extraordinary design for next phase of the High Line, which brings a new level the concept of urban park in the sky." "The amazing design team, Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, has created a magical environment that is at once ever-changing, intricate and sweeping. This amazing and totally unique public open space will be celebrated worldwide and stand as one of the great legacies of the Bloomberg Administration," she continued.

"Our design aims to reflect its singularity and linearity, its straight-forward pragmatism, its emergent properties with wild plantlife - meadows, thickets, vines, mosses, flowers, intermixed with ballast, steel tracks, railings, and concrete. The result is an episodic and varied series of public spaces and landscapes biotopes set along a simple and consistent line - a line that cuts across some of the most remarkable elevated vistas of Manhattan and the Hudson River," declared James Corner, principal of Field Operations.

"Through a strategy of agri-tecture that combines organic and building materials into a vegetal/mineral blend, the park accommodates the wild, the cultivated, the intimate and the social," said Ricardo Scofidio, principal of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

The park has generated enormous real estate interests and numerous new projects are in various stages of construction along its borders between 10th and 11th Avenues.