On a sunny afternoon, accompanied by a very, very fashionable friend, I walked the just-opened leg of the High Line, which stretches from 20th Street to 30th Street west of Tenth Avenue.  We roamed about a bit and then found a bench, kicked back, and enjoyed the better-than-any-movie display of humanity parading by.  It struck me that this was a quintessentially nineteenth-century pursuit, a lot like visiting one of the great European glass-covered shopping arcades.

One could argue that the notion of the arcade, and also of the flaneur, are quintessentially French.  But the arcade I remember best is the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, which is home to, among other businesses, the first Prada store.  But an arcade isn’t really about shopping.  It’s about dressing, strolling, gathering, watching, and wandering.  It’s a deeply pleasurable urban experience that unfolds, in some form, on every sidewalk in every city in the world.  The designers of the High Line have, rather brilliantly, given us an arcade in the shape of a park, without steel and glass, and without shops.