Photo by Craig.

The same design team that created New York City’s High Line, a popular elevated park, is turning its attention to the C&O Canal in Georgetown.

Georgetown Heritage announced that urban design and landscape architecture firm James Corner Field Operations will take the lead on creating the “Georgetown Canal Plan,” which will reimagine the neighborhood’s national park—its mile-long section of the Chesapeake and Ohio National Historical Park.

The C&O Canal is 184.5 miles along the Potomac River in D.C. and Maryland. It was built in the early nineteenth century to transfer cargo on barges, and became a national park in 1961 that also includes some land in West Virginia.

While boat rides along the locks that comprised the canal used to be a major tourist attraction, the boat was retired in 2010. The constant leakage from the locks that comprise the canal put the park on the docket for renovations.

“The Georgetown section of the C&O Canal NHP should be a landmark park for everyone,” said James Corner, founder and director of James Corner Field Operations, in a release. “A lively center for social gatherings, a continuous link for recreation and contemplation, a connector of neighborhoods and networks, and a model for urban livability and human health and wellbeing.”

Corner will be working with MakeDC, Robert Silman Associates, ETM Associates, and Dharam Consulting on the plan.

For now, the idea is in the development phase. Georgetown Heritage and NPS want to hear from the community about how “to improve the park’s unique stone structures, locks, towpath, plazas and street crossings to maximize the park’s immense educational, recreational, and aesthetic potential,” Georgetown Heritage said in its release.

The Georgetown Canal Plan is the first part of a multi-year restoration for the park, along with repairs to Locks 3 and 4 (which will require that the canal be dried out up to Lock 5 beyond the Maryland border), and the launching of a new historic replica canal boat. Those repairs began in October 2016, and are expected to wrap up by the summer of 2018.

The restoration of the boat and canal walls will cost about $10 million, with $3 million coming from the city.