Art News

New York City High Line inspires Philadelphia to redevelop Reading Viaduct

PHILADELPHIA (AP).- In a post-industrial neighborhood that inspired one of the strangest movies put to celluloid, a plan is afoot to transform its gloomiest ruin into a walkable elevated oasis. City officials and neighborhood supporters are preparing designs and raising money to clean and green a three-block branch of the mile-long Reading Viaduct, an abandoned railway that moved commuters and goods from 1893 to 1984, in an area nicknamed “the eraserhood.” The tongue-in-cheek compliment is a reference to the 1977 film “Eraserhead,” whose creator, David Lynch, lived within the grim patchwork of crumbling factories and vacant warehouses as an art student in the 1960s and called it his muse for the movie’s bleak and bizarre urban wasteland. Over the ensuing decades, empty buildings have been