Buffalo Bayou, a slow-moving waterway that runs through the center of Houston, is widely considered the city’s most significant natural resource. Over the past decade, the Bayou’s sector west of downtown has experienced renewed vibrancy as a result of placemaking interventions that created the 160-acre Buffalo Bayou Park, which features trails, play areas, a dog park, pavilions, and gathering spaces for residents to build community. However, the neighborhoods along the waterway’s eastern sector have not seen the same level of investment. These historically disinvested, majority-Black and Latino or Hispanic neighborhoods—the Greater East End and Fifth Ward—have long been physically separated both from the Bayou and each other by large industrial sites, poor street linkages, and limited connections across the waterway.

Today, we can announce we have selected Alan van Capelle to serve as our next Executive Director. In Alan, we have found someone with the experience, relationships, and passion to lead us into the next stage of our growth. He’ll officially join our team this coming January.

The High Line announces that a new exhibition, The Practice of Democracy: We Hold These Truths, is on now view through October 2, 2022 in the High Line’s 14th Street Passage. Through an immersive installation designed by April De Simone of the non-profit research and design agency Designing for Democracy, visitors are invited to explore the ways democracy shows up in our everyday lives, neighborhoods, and worlds. Organized as a past-to-present journey, the exhibition and related programming trace the policies, practices, and investments that shape how democracy is defined and experienced in our cities and the High Line in particular, and offer communities opportunities to connect through these experiences.

The High Line Network, a program of the High Line that supports a group of nonprofit organizations transforming underutilized infrastructure into new urban landscapes, announces the launch of its Community First Toolkit. Developed by the High Line Network in partnership with the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Urban Institute, the Community First Toolkit is an equity-based action planning resource for practitioners in the field of infrastructure reuse, as well as city officials, urban planners, nonprofit leaders, and other community members.