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fromSebastian Moll
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An “anti-city” for the super-rich? Today, the Hudson Yards is opening a new district in the US metropolis of New York.
Commuters who regularly use New York’s most popular bike path along the Hudson have noticed with growing regret over the past few months that the old view of the iconic Midtown Manhattan skyline has been blocked by a crowd of construction cranes and steel skeletons. The Empire State Building, for many decades one of the city’s landmarks, if not the symbol of the city, disappeared as did the Chrysler Building, swallowed up by the shell of a completely new district.
Now the quarter, christened Hudson Yards by the real estate industry, which has never lost a marketable name, is to be officially opened this Friday. The five central towers, the plans of which all come from the offices of renowned architects (including Foster + Partners, Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates and Diller Scofidio + Renfro), soar into the sky above Manhattan with HD sharpness that appears digital. A new glow and sparkle makes old New York look shabby and old behind it. It is already clear at first glance that a new New York is entering here to outshine the old.
The Hudson Yards is the most ambitious urban development New York has ever seen. Real estate developer Steve Ross has invested 25 billion dollars in his vision of a golden city within the city. When it is finally completed in the next two years, the complex will house 16 skyscrapers, which will include 560,000 square meters of office space, 5,000 luxury apartments and a shopping area of 70,000 square meters. Neither the new World Trade Center campus nor the historic Rockefeller Center can keep up in terms of scope and ambition.
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The whole thing is garnished by an avant-garde art and performance space, called “The Shed”, apparently intended to compete with MoMA and Lincoln Center as centers of the city’s cultural life. In the middle of the campus is a walk-in art structure called “The Vessel”, which the creator Thomas Heatherwick likes to call the Eiffel Tower of New York.
Despite the undisguised megalomania of the project, the new district has grown almost unnoticed in recent years. New Yorkers knew vaguely that something was happening on the west side. Even from 10th Avenue, which you only visit when you drive through or work there due to the lack of retail stores and restaurants, you could hardly see anything except for a site fence.
There’s something about the view
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The Hudson Yards is pinned to the edge of Manhattan like a forgotten addition. In contrast to the World Trade Center or the Rockefeller Center at the time, the problem of integrating the quarter into the urban fabric did not arise during the planning. On the contrary: the attraction of the project, which was built over the rails of the subway depot, was that you could plan completely from the drawing board, regardless of the context. “The great promise of the Hudson Yards,” writes Justin Davidson, New York Magazine’s reviewer, “was that you could create a whole new zone of the post-industrial metropolis without the burden of a complicated past.”
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The result is a “fantasy of the city of the 21st century,” as New York Magazine writes. It is a self-sufficient “gated community” for the super-rich, in which they can sleep, work, shop, eat and go to the theater without ever exposing themselves to the chaos and dirt of the city. Everything about Hudson Yards is top notch – the restaurants with star chefs, the luxury boutiques, the cultural offerings. “The residents should feel that they are getting only the best of everything,” writes Justin Davidson. You live in the best building in the best area in the greatest city in the world. “
The Hudson Yards are of course not the first drawing board city in the world. They have existed around the world since Brasilia at the latest, in Tokyo the Roppongi Hills were inaugurated in 2003. Abu Dhabi has its Masdar City and London its Canary Wharf.
In New York, the mega-block clears out the chaotic city with its much-cited “culture of density”, which ensures that lively anarchy and plurality that was once considered the essence of the city. They are replaced by orderly, hotel-like sterility, isolated from the life of the metropolis. Jeremiah Moss, author of the book “Vanishing New York”, a complaint about the lost soul of New York, calls the Yards an “anti-city” or a “plutocratic cloud”.
The development is not a coincidence. It follows the vision of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who never made a secret of wanting to convert the city into a “luxury product”. In his twelve years in office, Bloomberg changed the usage regulations for 40 percent of the city’s area, giving private developers the key to New York. Bloomberg, writes the sociologist Julian Brash, who coined the term New York’s neoliberalization, “made every effort to subordinate the city government and the physical shape of the city to the interests of a single social group.”
New York’s Eiffel Tower: The Vessel
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The Hudson Yards have been a matter close to the heart of Bloomberg from the start. The last fallow land in Manhattan above the tracks of the subway depot has always been a nuisance to the entrepreneur. Shortly after taking office, he used the city’s Olympic bid to rededicate the area.
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The application did not work, but the starting shot for the development of the corner of Manhattan, which was not profitable, had been given. And in Steve Ross, Bloomberg found a partner who not only had the deep pockets for such a mega project, but also shared Bloomberg’s vision of a tidy, aseptic Manhattan for the wealthy. Ross was motivated by more than 5.6 billion grants from tax revenues, significantly more than Amazon would have received.
A place for the super-rich, away from the filth of the city.
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Now that Bloomberg has been out of office for five years, New York is wondering if the Hudson Yards is a holdover from its long-drawn-out era or if the city’s hypergentrification never stopped. The zeal with which Bloomberg’s successor de Blasio has sought Amazon, as well as the continuation of Bloomberg’s planning policy by the man who had actually claimed to campaign for greater social justice, gives little hope. DeBlasio in Queens has just released an area seven times the size of Hudson Yards for development. Justin Davidson finds solace in the fact that the Hudson Yards are so severely separated from the rest of the city. “Perhaps,” he commented, “the area hovers over the city like a spaceship that does not want to land, while the old, chaotic, dirty and noisy life of New York continues below it.”
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