Growing Pains

John Haber
in New York City

Hudson Yards and Urban Development

Thomas Heatherwick: The Vessel

Cities thrive on growth. It may not seem that way, as poor and working-class communities fall to gentrification and as the grounds shift beneath your very own feet, but wait. They come about by growth, leaving others behind, along with much of their origins. They are engines of growth for the nation as a whole.

Cities die for lack of growth, as manufacturing abandons the Rust Belt. They compete for growth—for who will have the tallest building or the most modern subways. They compete, too, from within. The Chrysler Building in New York once vied for tallest with the Empire State Building, as they hurried to completion. And the city's skyline is still an emblem of growth to the world. Its subways, for that matter, were once three competing systems, and their current sorry state is not just an inconvenience but a crying shame.

Can cities also die from growth? Can growth even make them less urban? I could feel the excitement as a whole new neighborhood began construction on New York's far west side, between 30th and 34th Street, above the train yards serving Penn Station. And I could feel the chill as it opened to the public on the ides of March. By the time it is done, Hudson Yards will hold offices, apartments, shops, restaurants, an observation deck, and a hotel, along with an arts center, called The Shed, and a towering sculpture by Thomas Heatherwick, called for now The Vessel. Yet it feels like something dropped into the city from above—and from another continent or suburbia.

Talking to each other

Hudson Yards has grown vertically, from the ground up, but not from its roots in a vibrant and vital city. One could say that about any number of recent skyscrapers, like the slim towers at the foot of Madison Avenue, on West 57th Street, and on the Upper East Side. The very wealthy get their views, and everyone else gets an eyesore. I have a particular hatred, too, for Astor Place Tower, by Charles Gwathmey. It boasts of the incongruity of its stacked geometries and of its place just north of the Bowery. Yet Hudson Yards uses far more than just height and bad taste to set itself apart.

True, it is of a part with a city's organic development, in that it is taking shape one piece at a time. Just to speak of an opening day is to make an arbitrary call. Its shops and plaza opened to the public that same March day. And the eight-story sculpture invited one to walk right in and to climb right up. Still, The Shed with a design by Diller Scofidio + Renfro still had a few weeks to go, and a big pit is all that the site has to show for its sixth tower, by Norman Foster. Further development to the west has not even begun.

Then, too, what counts as Hudson Yards? Two heavier glass towers (both residential) are wrapping up to the east, between Hudson Yards and the grand old Farley Post Office (which is itself adding Moynihan Train Hall of Penn Station). The Jacob K. Javits Convention Center lies just to the north and west. And that does not even count the mess and mass going up across 34th Street along the Hudson River. Still, they are all part of the problem. One could feel the chill even before he formal opening, in an approach from Penn Station and the heart of the city.

From a distance, a great building like the Chrysler Building or the Empire State Building calls out a welcome, and tourists and New Yorkers alike respond. Downtown, I often orient myself by the Woolworth Building when I exit the confusion of the subway at Canal Street—and I still regret ever so much that its ornate lobby no longer lets strangers in. Even those isolated eyesores that I have mentioned send out a call, if only to stay away. Hudson Yard simply ignores you. Its sheer bulk says that it is here, and you are not. The angled cuts at the very top of two of the five existing towers, as if they were leaning into one another, further suggests that they are talking not to you, but to each other.

Not that they are listening. They were planned together, but each is its own bleak lesson in self-involvement. The crush of luxury condos to the south, amid the Chelsea galleries, at least includes a great final project by the late Zaha Hadid—plus the rarity of a second woman architect, Audrey Matlock, down on West 18th Street. Hadid retains her signature curves, set at a right angle in an embrace, but without her heavy cantilevers and concrete. Hudson Yards, too, draws on some of the biggest names in contemporary architecture, both the creative and the corporatist. I would do none of them a favor here by a listing.

The collective mass is discouraging enough to make my decade in architecture's five-worst list. They look just as faceless with their glass façades taken one at a time. Each tops off with a fillip, like angled pyramids (similar to that of Citicorp on the east side of midtown), and the angles of one extend further down the sides. Another tapers to a cylinder and a fourth to four merged cylinders. The fifth has steel rods between floors for a token display of warmth, with darker glass on its broader ten-story base, while another has white accents. Mostly, though, they seem desperate to set themselves in any way apart, and the two monsters along the way from the east are even worse.

City or suburb?

You may think that you have seen them all before, but not necessarily in person and definitely not in New York. They resemble cities that skipped right past the twentieth century and into money, in Asia or the Gulf States. The residences set aside 10 percent for affordable housing—or just over four hundred units. Set amid so much wealth, that, too, could stand for national and global inequality. So even more does a shorter block-long building for "the Shops." There one might have entered not a more faceless city, but suburbia.

It would have to be a very upscale suburb at that. A large logo for Neiman Marcus confronts visitors along Tenth Avenue, but it and other stores are of a piece. The bland dining options are as well, apart from the by now ubiquitous Shake Shack, as name chefs settle for pricey seafood and chops (although critics have praised a Spanish food court with its own entrance). Some plywood walls have paintings and drawings, but less as a concession to contemporary art than a concession that not all potential tenants have as yet a lease. Loud music intensifies the imposing but predictable experience. There are, though, views west and an exit onto the most public side of Hudson Yards, the plaza.

The plaza's white expanse belongs to the master plan, by Kohn Pedersen Fox under the direction of Stephen M. Ross. It could fit equally in Singapore or suburbia. If one had any doubts, Hudson Yards is still above and apart from the Manhattan grid, looking solely within. Any open space runs quickly into the towers, with an exit onto not a sidewalk but the High Line—a given, since the project had to come into existence above railroad yards. The plaza also holds the two remaining elements, The Shed and The Vessel. Like "Architecture Now" at MoMA, they stake their claim on something more than private means and private pleasure, but they, too, have a ways to go.

The Shed, by Diller Scofidio + Renfro with the Rockwell Group, takes the most risks, which is all to the good. Yet it looks like, well, a shed wrapped in shiny plastic. When New York's ban on plastic bags finally kicks in, it should be the first to go. Open in April, it has mostly performance spaces for still more big names, plus a short-lived "Open Call 21" and "Open Call 2024." It will also have a hefty ticket price—not just for theater and music, but even for its gallery, with an opening exhibition by Trisha Donnelly. Its director, Alex Poots, formerly ran the arts program at the Park Avenue Armory, with overblown and woefully overpriced events.

Time will tell, but one might be better off ascending The Vessel, for which online tickets are free. Thomas Heatherwick, the English architect and designer also under commission for Little Island on a pier by the Whitney Museum, has a knack for engineering marvels and a weakness for art as spectacle. Its tentative title aside, the sculpture's copper finish and criss-cross of stairwells, with lattice space in between, makes me think more of a gold coffee filter. Then again, I am an exercise and coffee addict, and I could get addicted to the climb as well. It does not, though, provide much of an escape.

It broadens as it rises, its reflective surface taking in everything around it. It is also truly interactive art, and it has great views across the train yard to the Hudson River. As one looks down and within, the stairwells appear as a dizzying hall of mirrors. As one looks down and without, one can survey the traffic on the plaza and within the mall. In The Third Man, Orson Welles looks down from a Ferris wheel in Vienna and demands to know if Joseph Cotton would "really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever." I would care very much about the human dots of New York City, but can I care half as much about Hudson Yards?

New York after all?

Is this, then, a privileged enclave from another continent, where wealthy galleries grow taller than ever? Or does it point instead to all that is wrong with the urban economy—with New York now a monument to the financial sector and to tourism? I meant my opening praise of growth as a provocation more than a settled truth. And many are asking whether the city can still live up to its promise amid rising towers, overcrowding, and inequality. They add to the strain on affordable housing and an aging infrastructure. At the same time, it will take more and not less construction to address both.

Cities always shed their past as they grow. People must have lamented the loss of villages as the five boroughs incorporated. And every New Yorker acquires a long list of treasured places long gone. They might be favorite bookstores, local bars, a century old Italian grocer, or the old entrance to the Morgan Library, past J. P. Morgan's library. Could my dismay at the latest development be just another delusion and another instance of "not in my backyard"? At the very least, Hudson Yards should have one asking hard questions about development, privilege, and their contradictions.

Ironies abound. The Javits Center came about because the former convention center, the Coliseum in Columbus Circle, could no longer keep pace with centers around the country, but it in turn fell short and is expanding several times over to the north. And now, between a cash shortfall and a rush to serve Hudson Yards, the extension of the subway there has missed the chance to revive the Javits Center with a stop further west on 42nd Street along the way. As for the Coliseum, it gave way to another office building and vertical shopping mall, Time Warner Center—and now WarnerMedia is among the first occupants of Hudson Yards, but already with thoughts of cashing in and moving out. Once again global capitalism has neither loyalties nor memories.

As a further irony, the Citicorp building has structural flaws that drove out tenants, and Citigroup has moved to Long Island City. As the most bitter of ironies, one of the architects of Hudson Yards, Kevin Roche, died just weeks before the opening. He also died just days before the reopening of an earlier triumph (it, too, in conjunction with John Dinkeloo). After a long renovation, the Ford Foundation once again welcomes visitors to its forested indoor space at the opposite extreme from a mall—and its new gallery is free. Will New Yorkers feel just as welcome here, and will they find themselves at home? I hope not to return to "the Shops" for a long time to come.

Still, New Yorkers are a hardy bunch, and the wealthy have means to spare. Together, they have adapted to yet another taste of the suburbs, the World Trade Center PATH station near Ground Zero, for the Oculus and its fancy stores. On opening weekend, the new mall was packed. Given how many will work in the towers and their convenience for gallery-goers and commuters, some are bound to return. Michael Bloomberg showed his Wall Street bias with his push for this development—and for the single subway stop added during his time as mayor. Could he, though, have been right about its worth all along?

I doubt it, just as I would attract jobs with better mass transit, more affordable housing, and direct hires rather than handouts to the likes of Amazon. Hudson Yards could become just a tourist destination—the same tourists who march the High Line. That development came about owing to local boosters, too. And yet its narrow file and its elevation above the grid proved to have little of what New Yorkers expect from a neighborhood or a park. I can only hope that the site will get people questioning, hard. I can only hope, too, against all odds for affordable tickets to The Shed.

jhaber@haberarts.com

My disclaimer notwithstanding, I should be negligent not to note that Kohn Pedersen Fox and Diller Scofidio + Renfro also designed towers, that Roche Dinkeloo & Associates collaborated with KPF, and that David Childs and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill served as architects for the rest. The western extension will have an even more prestigious cast.