What is so interesting is that back then, you needed to live on Manhattan or very near Manhattan if you worked there. Subways, trains, new suburbs, bridges and tunnels, and cars, enabled people employed by Manhattan businesses to live further away, like further out in the boroughs and towns on Long Island, upstate New York, and New Jersey. Now, the Internet and acceptance of remote work enables people employed by Manhattan companies to live even further away.

The nature of the businesses also changed dramatically, and a lot of that working class work from the late 1800s and early 1900s simply doesn’t exist anymore in manhattan. The highline exists because the industry that brought that elevated freight rail line into the city in the first place no longer exists. It would probably be very worthwhile to redesign the entire transit system today, considering the bulk of it was designed 100 years ago to serve a working population that no longer exists on their commute to jobs that also no longer exist.