Episode 09 - The High Line and Beyond: Robbie Hammond on Building The Impossible with Tenacity, Timing, and Vision
In this episode of The Lift, Ben is joined by Robbie Hammond – Co-Founder of The High Line, a beloved elevated park and greenway in NYC – and the global president of Therme Group, a company centered on urban wellbeing.
Key takeaways:
Break big, long-term visions into small, self-contained projects that show progress and keep you motivated
Tenacity matters more than perfect conditions, especially when politics and timing are outside your control
Knowing your own strengths (and limits) makes it easier to find partners who complement your skills
External success doesn’t automatically create internal well-being; therapy, meditation, and sometimes medication can be part of the leadership toolkit
Philanthropy and nonprofit structures can “hold the vision” while you wait for the right political and economic climate
This week on The Lift, Ben chats with Robbie about what it really takes to stick with a big idea for decades and actually make it happen.
Robbie never set out to be “the High Line Guy.” In fact, he describes himself as someone with a short attention span who came from dot-com startups, not urban planning. He was working in tech when he read a 1999 article about an old elevated freight rail line that the city planned to demolish. Curious, he went to a community board meeting, sat down next to a stranger (who turned out to be his future High Line Co-Founder, Joshua David), and realized they were the only two people in the room who didn’t want the structure torn down.
Neither of them had money, power, or relevant credentials. The mayor wanted it gone. Nearby property owners wanted it gone. Most neighbors wanted it gone. Robbie estimates the odds of success at the time were maybe one in a hundred. So why bother?
Robbie’s answer: It was a passion project. He still had a day job, but the High Line gave him a chance to work with architects, designers, and community members he never would’ve met otherwise. Even if the park never got built, he felt like the smaller projects along the way – a design competition, an education program, a street fair, early branding – were all meaningful in their own right.
That’s the core concept behind Robbie’s approach is “micro-dosing the vision.” When a project might take 10–20 years, you can’t wait for the grand opening to feel like you’re making progress. Instead, he advises, you break the journey into bite-sized, shippable milestones: a brochure here, a website there, a new partnership, a public event, a feasibility study. Each micro-project becomes proof that the idea is moving, even if the finish line is far away.
Ben and Robbie also explore the invisible emotional cost behind high-profile success. Robbie shares candidly that, even as the High Line became one of the most famous parks in the world and helped dramatically reshape Manhattan’s West Side and neighboring Hudson Yards, he didn’t actually enjoy his life for a long time. Like many founders, he was driven by fear of failure and chronic self-doubt.
What finally shifted? A mix of therapy, years of experimenting with different kinds of meditation, and eventually medication in his mid-40s. Those tools helped him regulate anxiety, sustain a healthy relationship, and build a family. They also gave him the internal stability to appreciate what he had already created instead of immediately chasing the next big thing.
On the strategy side, Robbie talks about the value of selling different versions of the same vision to very different audiences. For city government, the pitch was an economic-development story: invest public dollars to generate future tax revenue through higher property values and new development. For neighbors, it was about public space and quality of life. For partners and donors, it was about civic legacy and design innovation.
He describes how he and Joshua deliberately hired the kinds of experts developers usually use against community groups, like seasoned land-use lawyers, consultants, and lobbyists,so they could meet powerful stakeholders on equal footing.
Robbie also reflects on his work with Little Island and its founder, media executive Barry Diller. Initially, he was skeptical of the project and worried about yet another billionaire-backed park in an already amenity-rich neighborhood. But he’s come to respect Barry’s sheer tenacity and willingness to keep funding both its construction and ongoing maintenance, which is something many wealthy patrons don’t stick around for.
Today, Robbie is channeling his long-game muscles into Therme Group, which builds massive, urban wellbeing campuses inspired by ancient Roman baths. For him, Therme is a way to democratize wellness: not luxury spas for the few, but a social infrastructure for the many.
Because those projects move slowly, he’s still micro-dosing the vision through smaller, related creative experiments: hosting pop-up sauna villages, writing his “Culture of Bathe-ing” Substack, and collaborating with a Japanese creator who built a traveling onsen in the back of a truck. These side projects may not directly build a future Therme campus, but they keep the idea culturally alive and keep Robbie energized to keep going.
Ben and Robbie return to a few core leadership lessons throughout their conversation:
You don’t need perfect credentials to start; you can learn in public and hire for the skills you don’t have.
Long-term civic projects almost always require waiting out multiple political cycles. Nonprofits and philanthropy can act as the “memory” that holds the vision until the timing is right.
Success is not a substitute for well-being. Tools like therapy, meditation, and medication aren’t weaknesses; they’re often what make brave, sustained work possible.
Ultimately, this episode serves as a necessary reminder that while trends come and go, the real work is figuring out what keeps you going over the long haul.
