For anyone who’s ever wondered why it takes so much time and schleppery to build high-quality infrastructure in New York City, the new High Line Connector answers with an emphatic Ya gotta have clout! The one-block-wide, one-block-long, leaf- and CLT-laden appendix to the popular Manhattan skyway park appeared on the West Side practically overnight by local standards—eighteen months from start to finish. The quick and skillful execution is certainly a credit to the project’s designers, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and James Corner Field Operations, though it likely has as much or more to do with the influence of its backers: Brookfield Properties, owner of the Manhattan West commercial complex that marks the Connector’s eastern terminus; Friends of the High Line, the juiced-up nonprofit that transformed the former Chelsea elevated railway with help from Barry Diller, the Ford Foundation, Estée Lauder, and others; and the Empire State Development Corporation, the 800-pound bureaucratic gorilla whose bond-issuing and eminent-domain powers surely came in handy. While the Connector serves the laudable civic purpose of linking one of the city’s most well-trafficked green spaces with the new Amtrak facility at Moynihan Train Hall, its primary accomplishment was undoing the planning snafu created by the Related Companies’ pedestrian-blocking mall on the eastern flank of Hudson Yards, while affording Amazon employees in the former Farley Post Office a nicer walk to lunch. “On Margate Sands, / I can connect / Nothing with nothing,” wrote T. S. Eliot. In New York, you can connect anything with anything. If you know the right people.