Hudson Yards, the twenty-five-billion-dollar, twenty-eight-acre new development in what used to be the Meat Packing district is probably the most artificial site in all of New York, an unadulterated celebration of excess and greed.

As the New Yorker put it earlier in 2019 when many of the structures in this development opened: it’s the Hotel California of NYC.

It is a private space masquerading as a public one. It is the realized vision of one man, the developer Stephen Ross, the founder and chairman of Related Companies, who brought us the Time Warner Center a decade and a half ago. Ross, who will soon move into a penthouse at the development, calls his creation a neighborhood—“the neighborhood of the future,” in his company’s advertising lingo. In reality it is an enclave, a high-end corporate park buoyed by six billion dollars in tax breaks—an amount that dwarfs the subsidies offered to Amazon for its scuttled Queens headquarters—and designed as a kind of amenity-stuffed Hotel California that its residents never have to leave. (There are a limited number of so-called affordable units; in keeping with precedent in our city’s age of latter-day luxury, the people who live in them will have separate amenities, upstairs/downstairs style.) The only thing that Hudson Yards is missing is its own weather.

The High Line, once an imaginative new urban park (although it gave real estate companies license to dramatically hike up property values in the Meatpacking District,) now seems like a walkway, filled with throngs of tourists, moving through this luxury neighborhood unstoppably towards the nouveau-riche shopping center at its end and a hollow folly placed in the middle of it all: The Vessel. If there ever was a perfect symbol for grifter capitalism: this is it.

Designed by Thomas Heatherwick, the close to $200 million structure sports staircases rising into the air 150 feet – going nowhere. I take that back, they afford you views of the shores of New Jersey, advertisements from the adjacent mall, and endless opportunities to take selfies (note the terms of service agreement, though, which granted The Vessel all rights to any photos, audio, or video you take at the structure–meaning the developer could use your likeness for any commercial activity forever.)

As a supposed public amenity it sure lacks places to sit, although climbing it is technically free. Clad in gaudy copper it also serves as an amenity for the neighboring luxury apartment buildings (condos start at $2 million). The website for one of the luxury towers, 1 Hudson Yards, highlights the fact that the building overlooks the Vessel as a prime reason for why someone should spend $9,000 per month in rent for a two-bedroom apartment in the tower. The Vessel gives Related built-in marketing.

No wonder New Yorkers call it the golden Shawarma, among others.

And no, I did not climb it.

Fuck The Vessel

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Close-by is another architectural novelty: The Shed. The Washington Post‘s headline and attached article The-shed-is-the-only-reason-to-go-to-hudson-yards-new-yorks-most-hated-new-development captured it pretty accurately. Most people, of course, will walk by without a clue what this thing is or can do – “a boxlike form projecting out of the bottom of a high-rise residential tower, and a canopy with translucent plastic side panels, mounted on wheels and rails, that opens onto a public plaza. When the extension canopy is open, it incorporates a huge volume of temporary space for performances. A bit of leavening in this whole miserable, embarrassing tale of urban gigantism and one-percenter excess.”

Built at industrial scale, with industrial elements, it includes six-foot-wide steel wheels that carry the 120-foot-tall canopy along the rails, like the giant cranes that load cargo ships in a modern seaport. Clad in pillows of synthetic material that mimic the thermal properties of glass (with a fraction of the weight), the Shed, when open, encloses some 2 million cubic feet of interior space and can accommodate up to 3,000 people when the inner galleries are configured for expanded seating.

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Earlier in the day, I had marveled at bunnies. Well, marvel is perhaps the wrong verb. I had wracked my brain about who would buy these ceramic sculptures (larger than life by a factor of multitudes,) priced between $14.000 and $28.000. They were on exhibit at Dienst&Dotter Antikviteter, a store specializing in Scandinavian antiquities and art. The work, titled A Place behind the Oaktree is by Margit Brundin, who is an accomplished Swedish ceramicist (with a MFA in ceramic arts from the University of Goethenburg) whose work is in collections of the National Museum in Stockholm, the Röhsska Museum in Gothenburg and others.

The workmanship impressed, the whimsical quality appealed. The sculptures are built in a three-monthlong process from red stoneware clay and coil construction. The forms are painted with liquid clay colored with oxides like copper, iron, manganese’s and cobalt, capturing light that hints at movement. If only she’d had abstained from the anthropomorphizing…. Rolling tears, facial expression, references to Narcissus at the pool – why imbue the hares with human qualities, when a plain description of the beauty of nature via that terrific accumulation of her skills as a ceramicist and her artistic eye would have sufficed?

Wouldn’t you know it, my dreams were filled of them. They raced up and down that folly of a Vessel, as if they had discovered it as a vertical rabbit warren, trying to flee the lure of commercialism and consumerism all around them, with no escape at the end of the tunnels. There’s 2019 New York for you.

Luckily, we who have lived here and love the city to no end, are occasionally saved by humor. The Photograph below was taken on the High Line: someone thought it sufficient punishment for you-know-who to be forever watching the masses milling about the debacle of an artificial neighborhood.