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The ‘ultra-luxurious’ neighborhood of Hudson Yards, New York, has changed the future of a bleak present.
New York’s ‘ultra-luxurious’ Hudson Yards neighborhood has traded what would be a bright future for a bleak present since the pandemic began after several suicides at a tourist attraction, a wave of retail bankruptcies and an exodus of neighbors who have made it a symbol of an architecture that has pilloried the covid-19.
The largest real estate project in United States history, $ 25,000 million worth of land reclaimed from major train workshops on the banks of the Hudson River, doesn’t have the brilliance its promoters promised, with empty squares, shops, and offices impact of a pandemic year, but also due, according to experts, to a bombastic architecture, designed for millionaires and disconnected from the rest of the city.
Pre-pandemic architecture for post-pandemics
The pandemic has taken shame out of a project Michael Kimmelman, the newspaper’s influential architecture critic The New York Times, summarizes it as “a relic that inherits the way of thinking of the 2000s, is devoid of urban design and refuses to integrate into the city plan.”
“Hudson Yards is nowhere near the realization of Rockefeller Center, a similar corporate project involving public spaces. Someone who has not yet set foot in New York comes to Rockfeller and immediately understands the space; knows where it is, where it needs to go; in that sense it is a human design. At Hudson Yards space is superfluous, labyrinthine and without a clear architectural style. It’s a shapeless amoeba, ”explains Michael Lewis in an interview with Efe, a professor of American architecture at Williams College.
The fact that in the heart of the Hudson Yards is a shopping center identical in design to the many stores that have closed across the country, victims of the chain store apocalypse, gives a sense of that urban thinking of the past. .
In that shiny mall, several tenants are not going through their best moments of solvency: Neiman Marcus has abandoned his 18,000 square feet of stores occupying different heights after going bankrupt in less than two years, and Muji is in another bankruptcy lawsuit in US
In the era of Instagram and mass tourism in New York (more than 66 million visited the city in 2019, a number they won’t recover until 2024 due to the coronavirus), Hudson Yards, with its brand new Edge observatory, the most spectacular vantage point in Manhattan, which stands out among towers of glass and steel, was a magnet for the curious.
But this winter, the center of Hudson Yards looks like a giant quartz crystal with hundreds of workers working day and night to lift it from an unexpected ice age to a city that has lain in unusual silence for a year.
‘The Vessel’, a chrome-plated metal nest that allows tourists to climb eight flights of stairs to the top, an example of ‘Instagram architecture’, is closed indefinitely after the third suicide in less than a year and awaits that The advisers in this kind of kill make a new proposal to the developers of the complex, Related Companies and Oxford Properties.
The triumphal atmosphere of the mega-project, still unfinished, has vanished with the end of mass tourism and telecommuting, making elegant elevator guards at skyscrapers like those at 10 Hudson Yards the most notable residents of office centers. Where companies like Facebook are housed. , SAP, BCG or L’Oréal.
Last week, “El Mercado” of the well-known restaurant “Little Spain” tried to attract a small clientele with a special for Valentine’s Day: paella for two for $ 120, although the romantic evening was put through the dinner as the rice was only available for address.
Hundreds of the new luxury condos, ranging in price from $ 4 million to nearly $ 60 million, remain unsold, and last year found buyers for just a few dozen, five times less than sales in 2019, when the project was aiming high or high. .
Hudson Yards, an extension of sidings equal to more than six blocks, began to take shape with New York’s failed bid for the 2012 Olympics. Instead of hosting those facilities, former Mayor Mike Bloomberg turned the project into a plan that hasn’t been in the city since the construction of the Twin Towers in the 1970s.
The exclusive city
The ‘smart city’ project in this idyllic West End combines high-rise condos with luxury condos, branded stores such as Cartier or Fendi, a concert venue and office space for employees based in the New York salary dome.
The final phase involved creating green and public spaces for the Hudson River, one of the areas the city is reviving to re-attract visitors and residents, keys to getting the city’s budget back on track after the covid -19, and that was prepared last spring with the “capital of the world”.
Hudson Yards is the largest project in the country’s history that uses public funds and grants to promote a revitalization of a deprived area with the promise that this private development will boost the real estate market in the rest of the city and in the long term . it will generate more income for the treasury.
As explained Efe Bridget Fisher, Associate Director of the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis, the tax incentive system for this multimillion-dollar project is designed so that it is not affected by budget cuts that threaten health, schools or transportation.
“Even in a time of crisis like this, supporting a neighborhood called ‘the fantasy city of billionaires’ will take precedence. The city government decided to take the risk of the project and now we have a vulnerable economy for the commercial and office sectors, ”says Fisher.
“I think they risk bankruptcy, but ultimately it depends on people accepting this new part of town and moving to it,” says Lewis. (I)