“The last thing New Yorkers need is a wall,” a state senator said.
For phase two, the developer imagines a 700-foot-long structure overshadowing the High Line.
Writing in The New York Times, architecture critic Michael Kimmelman sounds off against recently revealed intentions by Related Companies, the developer of Hudson Yards, that could wall off a semi-public park slated for the western end of the mega-project's second phase site.
The plan for the so-called Western Yard development was originally approved containing a green space that dipped down to meet the city's Hudson River edge, but is now potentially being changed to create a "man-made promontory" that could limit visual connections between the High Line and the park, potentially cementing the district's already strong reputation for existing as a "quasi-gated community" in the heart of Manhattan. 1
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This was the image sold to the public: the yard as accessible, hospitable and open to everyone1. As recently as Wednesday, when a request from The New York Times to reproduce it was turned down, Hudson Yards’s website featured a rendering by Nelson Byrd Woltz, the landscape architects Related hired for Hudson Yards, showing a green Western Yard spooning with the High Line, the two sharing sunny, wide-open views of each other and the river.
But in private meetings with community officials the developer has recently been talking about elevating the yard’s deck several stories to fit a parking garage underneath.
According to various people who have heard Related executives float the trial balloon, the site would no longer decline toward the river but rise up, as it moved east to west, creating an immense wall, some 700 feet long, just next to the High Line and towering some two stories above it. Related’s skyscrapers at the yard would rise beside and on top of that.
Among other things, the wall would visually and perhaps otherwise obscure public access from the High Line and from the street into the yard, turning Related’s development into a man-made promontory, its occupants gazing down on the High Line’s visitors. It would also make the High Line seem the equivalent of an old city fire escape: a piece of aged infrastructure stuck to a wall.
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- 1. The plan brings to mind the long history of deals the city has struck with developers to eke public space out of private developments, including the so-called POPS (Privately Owned Public Spaces) of the 1960s and subsequent decades, which, partly through City Hall’s failure to provide oversight, produced many windswept plazas and heavily policed, frequently shuttered office building lobbies — unwelcoming sites that prioritized the privacy developers actually wanted all along.
