The High Line before there was a High Line: Rosslyn, VA's Freedom Park

[Cirrus]

New York's High Line has become the darling of American parks, but did you know Rosslyn, VA has been home to a similar elevated linear park for fifteen years?

Freedom Park covers approximately two blocks of an elevated roadway that was closed to traffic in 1996. Compared to the High Line, Freedom Park is obviously small and bare. Rather than a gathering place for one of America's densest residential neighborhoods, it's primarily used as a lunch plaza by workers in Rosslyn's many office buildings.

So while Freedom Park is inferior to and much less famous than the High Line, it's still an interesting place that's worth sharing.

So here you go:

This is an aerial of Rosslyn which shows the location of Freedom Park (in red). To orient yourself, the Potomac River is in the upper right of this image, with DC on the opposite shore.


This is what the park looks like from the street below:


From 1996 to 2008 the park was part of the "Newseum", a museum devoted to news that eventually moved to a more central location in DC. Back in the Newseum days the park had a lot of exhibits, including one with a large piece of the actual Berlin Wall. That was moved with the Newseum in 2008, but this section of the exhibit remains, at ground level next to the entrance to Freedom Park, in the area marked as yellow on the map above:


This is one of three entrances from the street. Several buildings also have entrances from their second floors:


The dome is a theater that used to be part of the Newseum and is now called the Artisphere:










The pathway to the left here goes down to street level where there is an entrance. The main park extends to the right.










The second street entrance:


Freedom Park is called a park, but it is privately operated and thus, ironically, it isn't very free.


Here you can see the third street entrance, the one that comes at the end of the pathway that split off several pictures up.


Let's go down there:




And that's pretty much all there is to it.

Here are some views from the park, of Rosslyn and the surrounding areas: