 All right, thank you first. I'll describe quickly what friends of the High Line is we are a private Not-for-profit 501c3. We have a license agreement with the parks department in the city of New York to operate and maintain the High Line very much like Central Park Alliance in Prospect Central Park Conservancy and Prospect Park Alliance one difference between those Conservancies and us is that we were the entity that advocated for and ended up helping build The parks we get a little bit more leniency with the city Going back to how we got into that role in the first place The High Line was actually built in response to Inefficient and dangerous conditions on the west side with a lot of freight rail running directly on the city streets The city state and the rail companies felt it was better to lift the rail lines and run them between block between 10th and 11th Avenue often through buildings bringing freight in and taking freight out and these Ran pretty continuously through the 60s and into the 70s When the freight rail system was starting to give way to the highway system and manufacturing began moving out of the city I Agree with you. I think some of these older pictures from the 60s and 70s are as beautiful as the newer pictures of the High Line So I always focus on this one in around the late 1990s the High Line was actually slated for demolition a lot of people felt that it was a blight on the West side It was preventing development and so there are a lot of politicians property owners and developers that were really pushing for demolition And it was right around that time where Robert Hammond and Josh David the two co-founders of Friends of the High Line met at a community board meeting hoping to find an existing organization that would be advocating for preservation of the structure of Finding none. They realized that they had to do it themselves somewhat reluctantly and this guy Every every good preservation effort needs a real nemesis and Giuliani was the voice of Demolition and the last thing he did before leaving office was sign a demolition degree Basically dooming the High Line to demolition. This was in around 2000 for the next five years Robert and Josh began a tireless frantic disorganized but ingenious campaign of public relations art installations Design competitions trying to bring the High Line into the collective consciousness of the City of New York to get everybody involved In what this project could be they sued the city They hired many many lawyers who were working pro bono at the time who no longer work pro bono for us Some of the design competitions in the early stages were we received somewhat like 700 public entry designs that were all Shown at Grand Central station so tens of thousands of people were seeing these crazy ideas as they were walking through Grand Central This was a swimming pool that went a mile and a half up and down the park Yeah, another was uh, you know fantastical designs a roller coaster on the High Line This one was all my all-time favorite really proposing that the High Line could solve the overcrowding prison population which I'm not sure it would have had the same impact on land values, but You know keep thinking creatively um Went through endless community meetings meetings with community boards meeting with the public getting input trying to figure out what the People in the neighborhood would want for the park All of these things went towards trying to develop a real argument to the city to save the High Line The one thing that really sold the public officials and politicians at that time Despite all the design work, which was beautiful and all of the other arguments Was an economic impact argument that was actually put together by hRNA in 2002 and it's pretty straightforward The city could spend a certain amount of money on the public uh infrastructure the capital project and it would reap a much larger reward on the back end as you saw increase in real estate taxes transfer taxes and tourism The numbers quoted in 2002 were that the project would cost a hundred million Lisa I think we can talk about that afterwards And the revenue would be 260 we you know double our money the city would double its money the actual I don't Post these but the actual number is the cost of the project is around 222 million And the incremental revenue associated directly with the High Line is well over a billion dollars to the city of new york So I think by any measure on the economic side this project is considered a success So what do we do in addition to the advocacy I just spoke about we oversee the design and construction along with the city We operate and maintain the park. That's horticulture Cleaning repairing we do a lot of public programming and public art And we do a lot of fundraising. We never stop fundraising Just showing some quick images of what the High Line looks now in the first two sections I think Lisa will talk a little bit more about some of the design elements Heading up you can see all of the new development around the park. There's just been a real building boom over the last 10 years A lot of really nice buildings a lot of not so great buildings, but a lot of buildings nonetheless Moving up section two onto the third section looking out at the water and the last section that will be Built probably in five or six years. This is an interim walkway where you can get out here But we're going to need to do the same type of remediation and redesign of this piece So the horticulture and operations really is what it says, you know, we clean we snow remove we take out garbage We have a staff of 15 gardeners that work as though they're working on a botanical garden Working through the summer they are all housed in an office building that we have that's kind of Nestled into the Whitney Museum at the southern end of the park We do a lot of public programming over 450 public programs free Primarily targeted to new yorkers and people in the neighborhood Anything from salsa dancing to teen nights on the High Line Tai Chi which Yeah Very peaceful Public art we we really have been focusing on our public art free public art museum quality. We have a curator who is Very accomplished who is bringing in annual shows and public art will be a very very big part of the last piece of the design that we're developing now Elan that sui was on an adjacent building All of our license lego project was another popular run on the High Line so at this point The number of people coming to the High Line annually are it's actually now 7.6 million people Which is more than any of the other cultural institutions are getting annually We're about a third of those say two and a half million are new yorkers So we're getting more new yorkers than Half of those cultural institutions in the city Yet we are raising a hundred percent of our operating budget. We don't get any money from the city I say that we get two percent of our annual operating budget budget from the city But for the most part we are out actively privately raising money to operate and maintain the park And there's still more to build this is a rendering of the eastern rail rail yards in the Hudson Yards We're very you know This will look like these renderings in two or three years and the High Line is still snaking beneath and we're still raising Money to build this project and building it while they're building Um And that's it. That's what we do