The suburbs have become more mixed, trafficky, crime-ridden, and complicated, and so, if you need exclusivity at all costs, an urban enclave with a quick elevator ride to the stratosphere looks especially appealing.
It strikes me as profoundly strange, this need to re-create an uncitylike city, so aloof from the porous, welcoming, spontaneous metropolis we like to think we inhabit. In the renderings that Related uses to market this new world, just about every one of the digital people strolling through the virtual cityscape is young, thin, able-bodied, and white. This para-Manhattan, raised on a platform and tethered to the real thing by one subway line, has no history, no holdover greasy spoons, no pockets of blight or resident eccentrics - no memories at all. Everything is too clean, too flat, too art-directed.
#FANTASIA WHEN I SEE YOU AGAIN MOVIE#
Yet I can’t help feeling like an alien here, as though I’ve crossed from real New York, with all its jangling mess, into a movie studio’s back-lot version. They’ve paved a parking lot and put up a high-rise paradise. The 101st-floor party space, surely to be among the priciest available, will be the place to host the most ostentatious vodka launch in town. The retail complex will have at least six places where you can spend five figures on a wristwatch (Patek Philippe, Rolex, Cartier, Watches of Switzerland, Piaget, Tiffany). Who’s to cavil when the money flows? The asset-management team BlackRock signed up to spend $1.25 billion in rent over 20 years. New York isn’t done building towers, and unlike the skinny plutocratvilles going up on 57th Street, new office buildings are a necessity, one where tens of thousands of New Yorkers will spend their days (and some will work through the night). There will be jobs, yogawear, art shows, tapas, even some affordable apartments.
#FANTASIA WHEN I SEE YOU AGAIN FULL#
The complex redeems an area that until recently most New Yorkers barely knew existed, a great pit full of resting trains open to the sky. Offices will hum with necessary invention, the plaza will teem, and the towers will settle into the accommodating skyline. New York can absorb even this, I tell myself.
( You can read about him here.)Įach time I approach, I feel a volatile mix of wonder and dejection roil in my chest. It’s a one-shot, supersized virtual city-state, plugged into a global metropolis but crafted to the specifications of a single boss: Related’s chairman, Stephen Ross. Besides being big, Hudson Yards represents something fundamentally new to New York. When the rest of it is finished - when the remaining rectangle of exposed rail yards between 11th and 12th Avenues is covered by a deck and more residential towers - the whole 28-acre shebang will be bigger than the United Nations, the World Trade Center, or Rockefeller Center and physically vaster, more populous, and more expensive than any private development in the country. On March 15, after 12 years of planning and six of construction, the Related Companies (which is actually just one mammoth real-estate company) will open the gates to its new $25 billion enclave, an agglomeration of supertall office towers full of lawyers and hedge-funders, airborne eight-figure apartments, a 720,000-square-foot shopping zone, and a gaggle of star-chef restaurants. An adventurous few will be able to take a dedicated elevator even further up to the pointed peak, don a harness, climb out on a catwalk in the open air, and howl into the wind. The space won’t open for another year, but I can already see the over-the-top weddings in the party room upstairs, where guests can dance far, far above the stink and mess below. I can behold the widescreen, high-res view of a New York more orderly and wondrous than the one most of us live in.
From here - or better yet, from the set of bleachers that allows you to peer over the glass railing - I can look down on the Empire State Building. That’s the outdoor observation deck, which juts out 65 feet and comes to a point 1,100 feet above the street.
At a distance, the tallest looks like a high-browed robotic duck with a beak so generous you could almost land a helicopter on it. Jagged and reflective, the five new towers have a high-definition clarity that the physical world mostly lacks. On a day when the cold makes the skyline snap into focus as if you’re seeing it through new lenses, Hudson Yards seems more virtual than real.
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