Wednesday night at CUNY’s Graduate Center, a packed room listened to four influential people discuss whether the development of the High Line can or should be considered an exemplary or replicable model for the intersection of public and private interests in the development of a public amenity. The panel assembled for “The New York High Line: Is it a Model for the City or Not?” was comprised of a writer, the New Yorker‘s Malcolm Gladwell, one of the visionaries behind the project, Friends of the High Line‘s co-founder and president Robert Hammond, a leading expert on affordable housing and community development, the Citizens’ Housing and Planning Council‘s Jerilyn Perine, and a political scientist, CUNY’s own John Mollenkopf.