9 ms·

A city for the rich, built poorly: The construction of Hudson Yards

219 points by jsjohnst 7y ago

neonate 7y ago
Site is down for me but http://archive.is/tURdz http://archive.is/tURdz has the article.
nafizh 7y ago
Every empire goes down eventually. The derision of the crown jewel (NYC) of the US empire perfectly resembles the fact that the sun is setting.
- walterbell 7y ago
  Hudson Yards has little to do with the rest of NYC, as stated in the article. Many of the residences were sold to foreign owners. It did succeed at extracting a billion dollars from foreign investors.
  - subpixel 7y ago
    > Many of the residences were sold to foreign owners. There isn’t a section of NYC to which this does not apply. All over Manhattan and in 7+ figure properties in every borough, the percentage of foreign buyers is higher than ever. This doesn’t even take into consideration the phenomenon of foreign investors in the multi-family rental and flipping market.
    - walterbell 7y ago
      Did those properties gerrymander NYC zoning to allow the buyers to get green cards in exchange for purchasing residences? https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/04/hudson-yards-financing-eb5-investor-visa-program-immigration/586897/ https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/04/hudson-yards-financin...
  - cco 7y ago
    That sounds like a terrible thing for New Yorkers and make just a bad thing for Americans at large. Why do you categorize this as a win?
    - walterbell 7y ago
      It's not a win.
- dang 7y ago
  "Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
joe_the_user 7y ago
So basically the skyscraper version of a McMansion [1] or even, given the talk here of money laundering, an example of Narcotecture creeping into America [2]. [1] https://mcmansionhell.com/ https://mcmansionhell.com/ [2] https://stephanierogers.typepad.com/stephanie_rogers/2007/07/narcotecture.html https://stephanierogers.typepad.com/stephanie_rogers/2007/07... Also: https://www.google.com/search?hs=MvG&channel=fs&q=Narcotecture&tbm=isch&source=univ&client=ubuntu&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjB8PzjppTiAhURRKwKHTfNDgcQsAR6BAgIEAE&biw=1366&bih=611 https://www.google.com/search?hs=MvG&channel=fs&q=Narcotectu...
- rdiddly 7y ago
  Same writer, on the "Vessel": https://thebaffler.com/latest/fuck-the-vessel-wagner https://thebaffler.com/latest/fuck-the-vessel-wagner
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- rootusrootus 7y ago
  Been a long time since I visited McMansionHell.com. It seems to have jumped the shark a while back. I used to think it was funny. It's also possible that the web page design is intentionally ironic.
  - twblalock 7y ago
    It's a smug and mean-spirited site, even though what it says about McMansions is generally true.
- PorterDuff 7y ago
  'Narcotecture'. I like that. It seems to me that to get 100 on that scale you need flesh colored Greek statues in the front yard. ( (prophylactic) yes yes, I know that they used to paint statues. Thanks.)
davidwihl 7y ago
I live across the street from the Shed (and Hudson Yards). 1) Since opening, the mall has added a ton of indoor seating. The place is so popular that sometimes people still sit on the floor. This is success not sour grapes. 2) The escalators seem purposefully designed to make you wander around the mall. If you want vertical speed, there are many elevators, which the author neglected to mention. The place is very popular. I’m certainly happy to have world class dining, shops and arts instead of a rail yard. The article is basically a hatchet job.
- subpixel 7y ago
  People sit on the floor b/c of a lack of seating which is by conscious design so as to inhibit people lounging around.
  - walterbell 7y ago
    Since lack of seating is forcing people to sit on the floor, they can try some other anti-seating technologies that have been deployed in London and New York.
  - dTal 7y ago
    In other words, hostile design. If you're not doing a New York hustle walk on your way to or from spending money, you're not welcome. No sitting down to chat, not even if you've bought food. Because the unforgivable sin in a capitalist culture is engaging with your fellow humans for free, instead of paying money to engage with goods and services.
- asveikau 7y ago
  I think the questions of building quality are a bit broader than just this project. It causes me to ponder how ambitious new construction projects always end up very expensive and showing issues. It feels like the US has lost its knack for big ambitious construction that it had in the 20th century. This seems independent of whether or not it's a popular attraction.
  - 7y ago
ghaff 7y ago
What’s unclear is the degree to which these construction problems are unusual for a project of this magnitude, especially given some fairly one-off designs.
ChuckMcM 7y ago
I am unable to understand how people in Manhattan are so divided by this development. It is just a bunch of buildings.
- klodolph 7y ago
  There is not really much division to speak of.
- drharby 7y ago
  people aren't, it's just the media. Some people are kinda meh about the financing behind this because it used gerrymandering to get funding diverted from say Harlem, but no real conversation daily.
- gliop 7y ago
  People are mad that $4B was spent building this tacky thing instead of on improving the city for not multimillionaires.
  - kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
    Well it is Harlem South. They needed a luxury mall too.
  - TomMarius 7y ago
    Did the government fund it or where's the problem?
DoreenMichele 7y ago
You get the distinct sense that you’re walking through a computer rendering rather than a real place. Aesthetic is prioritized over function everywhere you go. In the Shops and Restaurants at Hudson Yards, escalators are not positioned to allow a seamless flow up and down the levels of the mall, but rather, to make the complex photogenic; often requiring you to search at each level for the next escalator down in order to exit. We seem to have generally begun to err in this direction. We are surrounded by visuals 24/7 via TV, magazines, internet, etc in a way that wasn't the case when I was a small child and didn't exist at all when, say, my dad was a child. I think this is a consequence of that. Our focus is much more on looks than on other aspects of the design experience or life generally. I don't know what the solution is. I keep toying with the idea that I want to, for example, blog about clothes or home related things without jumping on the bandwagon of filling it with appealing photos. It seems like a non-starter though. But we have women undergoing cosmetic surgery because we are so focused on these photo shopped images of women who are already statistical outliers in some way and whose look was developed by a combination of a professional makeup artist, professional wardrobe person and professional hair stylist. Then they taped up her breasts and put 30 bobby pins in the jacket so it would fall a certain way. Then a professional photographer took 300 pictures, only one or two of which are going to be used in the publication. Let me reiterate: After all that, they are photo shopped to boot to achieve some completely unrealistic notion of beauty or perfection or whatever. We think that's what real people are supposed to look like. The magazines that do this literally try to sell us on the idea that they are in the business of telling us how we are supposed to look, never mind that no one can actually look like that in real life, not even the professional models who were used in the shoot. We do the same thing with housing, home decor, etc ad nauseum. And it is going bizarre places in a manner that is negatively impacting how we conceptualize and create real spaces, clothes to wear and so on. Then we wonder why so much stuff out there is dreck.
tallasabuilding 7y ago
As an actual architect, this article is pretty hilarious. There are a couple of egregious things, such as the entry portal panel misalignment - that should have been (or will be?) fixed. Too important of an area to let that slide. The other items like small panel gaps, overextended saw cuts in pavers, etc... come on. I challenge anyone to go to any building ever and not find imperfections. Maybe surprisingly, building buildings is complex, and i'd rather goofballs complain about non-walkable rock areas then a building collapsing on itself. or its facade falling off. also: per code, railings can be gapped by 4" - its pretty much one of the only things installers need to make sure of so i'd be pretty surprised if that rail gap is > 4" last, one of the images has a piece of blue tape indicating a "fix this" marker. Looks like they (arch? owner? contractor?) said "nah".
- TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
  I don't know if you've been to the UK, but you should look at some Victorian building projects - town halls, libraries, theatres - for comparison. It's easy to ignore imperfections with a modern sensibility, but those older buildings were crafted in a way that modern buildings don't seem to be. The driving ethic was typically local pride, and the buildings were designed and built as public statements to showcase that. Modern mall projects seem to be the opposite. There's no pride among either designers or builders. Everyone is there to do a job, including the building - which is primarily a cash extraction machine optimised for ROI, ineptly dabbed with superficial signifiers of status so it can appear appealing to people with money they can be parted from. At a guess, that's what this article is really objecting to.
  - digitaltrees 7y ago
    Those buildings survived, lots of haphazard buildings were not crafted, but bungled together overtime, most didn't survive; so there is a selection bias at work. I actually like the imperfections. I would prefer that we build and tear down so that our cities are dynamic as opposed to creating things that can never be changed and never adapt. Sometimes that's ok, but if that is the only way we build, large areas will end up stuck in time and useless.
  - 7y ago
PorterDuff 7y ago
It seems to me that they need to work harder at building temporary structures. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XopSDJq6w8E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XopSDJq6w8E
zild3d 7y ago
> Unsafe railing gaps what is unsafe about a space between railings at a corner that not even a hand can fit through?
cm2187 7y ago
What I find is that a lot is so-called "luxury" new residential blocks in London (often high rises) have pretty much no sound insulation between flats, which for a modern construction is shocking, let alone a luxury building. I am not convinced that upmarket constructions give you any guarantee of build quality. In fact many of these luxury flats were sold off-plan in Asia to people to whom it was a financial investment and had no intention to ever live there, I can see why the developers wouldn't bother.
godzillabrennus 7y ago
It’s my favorite part of NYC. The more the old complain about it the more affinity I have for it. They New York is to Europe as San Francisco is to Asia. Hudson Yards stands in stark and stunning contrast to that analogy.
purplezooey 7y ago
the things he points out are indeed pretty janky.
code4tee 7y ago
I would imagine on most new construction you could find little things like that if you look hard enough. They should be noted and fixed by the contractors but such items don’t constitute the whole complex being “built poorly.” That seems a bit of a stretch with an alternative agenda.
teslaberry 7y ago
hudson vs. housing shortage anti-development politics of west coast. the west mentality is to bitch aboit liberal issues and then with personal action burn as much gasoline as texans while voting to institutionalize relatively predictable green scams which destroy resources , resource production, and the environment, such as fake high speed trains, and shutting down nuclear plants, while creating artificial scarcity resulting from idiocy like requiring all new homes built have solar rooftops. solar and batteries still are entirely produced in china asia and their mfg pollute like crazy. you want the future, you gotta take risks and let people build. the results might not be perfect but you get a better oitcome than californication embracing consumer culture.
headShrinker 7y ago
The real problem with Hudson Yards is that it’s walled up so it’s separate entity from the rest of the city. It completely breaks congruity with the rest of the island. This was likely a purposeful design choice similar to how Lincoln center was walled off before it’s redesign. The walls make you feel that what’s in side the walls is protected from the rest of the city as if the city and it’s people are hostile. At least that’s how it makes me feel as it dominates the only view of the city I have from my apartment window 10 blocks from it. We aren’t a hostile people but are upset about how this was funded: “As I reported back in 2017, records obtained by CityLab under the Freedom of Information Act reveal the gerrymandered map that Empire State used to qualify Hudson Yards for EB-5 financing. This particular TEA snakes up from the West Side and includes Central Park. (Think about that: a map of Manhattan that claims Central Park as an economically troubled area.) Beyond the park, the qualifying zone for Hudson Yards captures several census tracts in Harlem, where public housing projects boost the overall unemployment figure.” https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/04/hudson-yards-financing-eb5-investor-visa-program-immigration/586897/ https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/04/hudson-yards-financin...

219 points by jsjohnst 7y ago

Site is down for me but http://archive.is/tURdz http://archive.is/tURdz has the article.

Every empire goes down eventually. The derision of the crown jewel (NYC) of the US empire perfectly resembles the fact that the sun is setting.

walterbell 7y ago
Hudson Yards has little to do with the rest of NYC, as stated in the article. Many of the residences were sold to foreign owners. It did succeed at extracting a billion dollars from foreign investors.
- subpixel 7y ago
  > Many of the residences were sold to foreign owners. There isn’t a section of NYC to which this does not apply. All over Manhattan and in 7+ figure properties in every borough, the percentage of foreign buyers is higher than ever. This doesn’t even take into consideration the phenomenon of foreign investors in the multi-family rental and flipping market.
  - walterbell 7y ago
    Did those properties gerrymander NYC zoning to allow the buyers to get green cards in exchange for purchasing residences? https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/04/hudson-yards-financing-eb5-investor-visa-program-immigration/586897/ https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/04/hudson-yards-financin...
- cco 7y ago
  That sounds like a terrible thing for New Yorkers and make just a bad thing for Americans at large. Why do you categorize this as a win?
  - walterbell 7y ago
    It's not a win.
dang 7y ago
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

joe_the_user 7y ago

So basically the skyscraper version of a McMansion [1] or even, given the talk here of money laundering, an example of Narcotecture creeping into America [2]. [1] https://mcmansionhell.com/ https://mcmansionhell.com/ [2] https://stephanierogers.typepad.com/stephanie_rogers/2007/07/narcotecture.html https://stephanierogers.typepad.com/stephanie_rogers/2007/07... Also: https://www.google.com/search?hs=MvG&channel=fs&q=Narcotecture&tbm=isch&source=univ&client=ubuntu&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjB8PzjppTiAhURRKwKHTfNDgcQsAR6BAgIEAE&biw=1366&bih=611 https://www.google.com/search?hs=MvG&channel=fs&q=Narcotectu...

rdiddly 7y ago
Same writer, on the "Vessel": https://thebaffler.com/latest/fuck-the-vessel-wagner https://thebaffler.com/latest/fuck-the-vessel-wagner
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
rootusrootus 7y ago
Been a long time since I visited McMansionHell.com. It seems to have jumped the shark a while back. I used to think it was funny. It's also possible that the web page design is intentionally ironic.
- twblalock 7y ago
  It's a smug and mean-spirited site, even though what it says about McMansions is generally true.
PorterDuff 7y ago
'Narcotecture'. I like that. It seems to me that to get 100 on that scale you need flesh colored Greek statues in the front yard. ( (prophylactic) yes yes, I know that they used to paint statues. Thanks.)

davidwihl 7y ago

I live across the street from the Shed (and Hudson Yards). 1) Since opening, the mall has added a ton of indoor seating. The place is so popular that sometimes people still sit on the floor. This is success not sour grapes. 2) The escalators seem purposefully designed to make you wander around the mall. If you want vertical speed, there are many elevators, which the author neglected to mention. The place is very popular. I’m certainly happy to have world class dining, shops and arts instead of a rail yard. The article is basically a hatchet job.

subpixel 7y ago
People sit on the floor b/c of a lack of seating which is by conscious design so as to inhibit people lounging around.
- walterbell 7y ago
  Since lack of seating is forcing people to sit on the floor, they can try some other anti-seating technologies that have been deployed in London and New York.
- dTal 7y ago
  In other words, hostile design. If you're not doing a New York hustle walk on your way to or from spending money, you're not welcome. No sitting down to chat, not even if you've bought food. Because the unforgivable sin in a capitalist culture is engaging with your fellow humans for free, instead of paying money to engage with goods and services.
asveikau 7y ago
I think the questions of building quality are a bit broader than just this project. It causes me to ponder how ambitious new construction projects always end up very expensive and showing issues. It feels like the US has lost its knack for big ambitious construction that it had in the 20th century. This seems independent of whether or not it's a popular attraction.
- 7y ago

ghaff 7y ago

What’s unclear is the degree to which these construction problems are unusual for a project of this magnitude, especially given some fairly one-off designs.

ChuckMcM 7y ago

I am unable to understand how people in Manhattan are so divided by this development. It is just a bunch of buildings.

klodolph 7y ago
There is not really much division to speak of.
drharby 7y ago
people aren't, it's just the media. Some people are kinda meh about the financing behind this because it used gerrymandering to get funding diverted from say Harlem, but no real conversation daily.
gliop 7y ago
People are mad that $4B was spent building this tacky thing instead of on improving the city for not multimillionaires.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
  Well it is Harlem South. They needed a luxury mall too.
- TomMarius 7y ago
  Did the government fund it or where's the problem?

DoreenMichele 7y ago

You get the distinct sense that you’re walking through a computer rendering rather than a real place. Aesthetic is prioritized over function everywhere you go. In the Shops and Restaurants at Hudson Yards, escalators are not positioned to allow a seamless flow up and down the levels of the mall, but rather, to make the complex photogenic; often requiring you to search at each level for the next escalator down in order to exit. We seem to have generally begun to err in this direction. We are surrounded by visuals 24/7 via TV, magazines, internet, etc in a way that wasn't the case when I was a small child and didn't exist at all when, say, my dad was a child. I think this is a consequence of that. Our focus is much more on looks than on other aspects of the design experience or life generally. I don't know what the solution is. I keep toying with the idea that I want to, for example, blog about clothes or home related things without jumping on the bandwagon of filling it with appealing photos. It seems like a non-starter though. But we have women undergoing cosmetic surgery because we are so focused on these photo shopped images of women who are already statistical outliers in some way and whose look was developed by a combination of a professional makeup artist, professional wardrobe person and professional hair stylist. Then they taped up her breasts and put 30 bobby pins in the jacket so it would fall a certain way. Then a professional photographer took 300 pictures, only one or two of which are going to be used in the publication. Let me reiterate: After all that, they are photo shopped to boot to achieve some completely unrealistic notion of beauty or perfection or whatever. We think that's what real people are supposed to look like. The magazines that do this literally try to sell us on the idea that they are in the business of telling us how we are supposed to look, never mind that no one can actually look like that in real life, not even the professional models who were used in the shoot. We do the same thing with housing, home decor, etc ad nauseum. And it is going bizarre places in a manner that is negatively impacting how we conceptualize and create real spaces, clothes to wear and so on. Then we wonder why so much stuff out there is dreck.

tallasabuilding 7y ago

As an actual architect, this article is pretty hilarious. There are a couple of egregious things, such as the entry portal panel misalignment - that should have been (or will be?) fixed. Too important of an area to let that slide. The other items like small panel gaps, overextended saw cuts in pavers, etc... come on. I challenge anyone to go to any building ever and not find imperfections. Maybe surprisingly, building buildings is complex, and i'd rather goofballs complain about non-walkable rock areas then a building collapsing on itself. or its facade falling off. also: per code, railings can be gapped by 4" - its pretty much one of the only things installers need to make sure of so i'd be pretty surprised if that rail gap is > 4" last, one of the images has a piece of blue tape indicating a "fix this" marker. Looks like they (arch? owner? contractor?) said "nah".

TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
I don't know if you've been to the UK, but you should look at some Victorian building projects - town halls, libraries, theatres - for comparison. It's easy to ignore imperfections with a modern sensibility, but those older buildings were crafted in a way that modern buildings don't seem to be. The driving ethic was typically local pride, and the buildings were designed and built as public statements to showcase that. Modern mall projects seem to be the opposite. There's no pride among either designers or builders. Everyone is there to do a job, including the building - which is primarily a cash extraction machine optimised for ROI, ineptly dabbed with superficial signifiers of status so it can appear appealing to people with money they can be parted from. At a guess, that's what this article is really objecting to.
- digitaltrees 7y ago
  Those buildings survived, lots of haphazard buildings were not crafted, but bungled together overtime, most didn't survive; so there is a selection bias at work. I actually like the imperfections. I would prefer that we build and tear down so that our cities are dynamic as opposed to creating things that can never be changed and never adapt. Sometimes that's ok, but if that is the only way we build, large areas will end up stuck in time and useless.
- 7y ago

PorterDuff 7y ago

It seems to me that they need to work harder at building temporary structures. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XopSDJq6w8E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XopSDJq6w8E

zild3d 7y ago

> Unsafe railing gaps what is unsafe about a space between railings at a corner that not even a hand can fit through?

cm2187 7y ago

What I find is that a lot is so-called "luxury" new residential blocks in London (often high rises) have pretty much no sound insulation between flats, which for a modern construction is shocking, let alone a luxury building. I am not convinced that upmarket constructions give you any guarantee of build quality. In fact many of these luxury flats were sold off-plan in Asia to people to whom it was a financial investment and had no intention to ever live there, I can see why the developers wouldn't bother.

godzillabrennus 7y ago

It’s my favorite part of NYC. The more the old complain about it the more affinity I have for it. They New York is to Europe as San Francisco is to Asia. Hudson Yards stands in stark and stunning contrast to that analogy.

purplezooey 7y ago

the things he points out are indeed pretty janky.

code4tee 7y ago

I would imagine on most new construction you could find little things like that if you look hard enough. They should be noted and fixed by the contractors but such items don’t constitute the whole complex being “built poorly.” That seems a bit of a stretch with an alternative agenda.

teslaberry 7y ago

hudson vs. housing shortage anti-development politics of west coast. the west mentality is to bitch aboit liberal issues and then with personal action burn as much gasoline as texans while voting to institutionalize relatively predictable green scams which destroy resources , resource production, and the environment, such as fake high speed trains, and shutting down nuclear plants, while creating artificial scarcity resulting from idiocy like requiring all new homes built have solar rooftops. solar and batteries still are entirely produced in china asia and their mfg pollute like crazy. you want the future, you gotta take risks and let people build. the results might not be perfect but you get a better oitcome than californication embracing consumer culture.

headShrinker 7y ago

The real problem with Hudson Yards is that it’s walled up so it’s separate entity from the rest of the city. It completely breaks congruity with the rest of the island. This was likely a purposeful design choice similar to how Lincoln center was walled off before it’s redesign. The walls make you feel that what’s in side the walls is protected from the rest of the city as if the city and it’s people are hostile. At least that’s how it makes me feel as it dominates the only view of the city I have from my apartment window 10 blocks from it. We aren’t a hostile people but are upset about how this was funded: “As I reported back in 2017, records obtained by CityLab under the Freedom of Information Act reveal the gerrymandered map that Empire State used to qualify Hudson Yards for EB-5 financing. This particular TEA snakes up from the West Side and includes Central Park. (Think about that: a map of Manhattan that claims Central Park as an economically troubled area.) Beyond the park, the qualifying zone for Hudson Yards captures several census tracts in Harlem, where public housing projects boost the overall unemployment figure.” https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/04/hudson-yards-financing-eb5-investor-visa-program-immigration/586897/ https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/04/hudson-yards-financin...