hudsonyards

Earlier this year, the New York Times pro­duced a char­ac­ter­is­ti­cally stun­ning piece of in­ter­ac­tive jour­nal­ism that I’m just get­ting around to read­ing, ti­tled “Hudson Yards Is Manhattan’s Biggest, Newest, Slickest Gated Community. Is This the Neighborhood New York Deserves?” In it, Michael Kimmelman out­lines one of the more re­cent — and most vis­i­ble — ex­am­ples of the fail­ure of con­tem­po­rary ar­chi­tec­tural and ur­ban plan­ning prac­tices to gen­er­ate co­her­ent places.

The es­say ends with the fol­low­ing re­flec­tion.

Up in the sky, Hudson Yards’ ob­ser­va­tion deck may also be­come an at­trac­tion — a tri­an­gu­lar plat­form, 1,100 feet high, the­atri­cally can­tilevered from the top of 30, with bleach­ers that pro­vide an even loftier view. It opens next year.

I got a pre­view the other day. It’s one of the most amaz­ing vis­tas over the city. I gazed north to­ward Harlem, gaped at the Empire State Building, and took in Lower Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty.

New York is awe­some, I thought.

Then it oc­curred to me.
From that deck, you can’t see Hudson Yards.

Which re­minded me of one of my fa­vorite pas­sages from one of my fa­vorite books, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, by David Markson.

When the sun had got­ten to the an­gle from which Phidias had taken his per­spec­tive, the Parthenon al­most seemed to glow.
Actually, the best time to see that is gen­er­ally also at four o’­clock.
Doubtless the tav­erns from which one could see that did bet­ter busi­ness than the tav­erns from which one could not, in fact, even though they were all in the same street.
Unless of course the lat­ter were pa­tron­ized by peo­ple who had lived in Athens long enough to have got­ten tired of see­ing it.
Such things can hap­pen. As in the case of Guy de Maupassant, who ate his lunch every day at the Eiffel Tower.
Well, the point be­ing that this was the only place in Paris from which he did not have to look at it.

I can’t seem to con­firm or deny whether this par­tic­u­lar story is apoc­ryphal, but Maupassant does seem to have pre­saged Kimmelman’s malaise.

It was­n’t only the Eiffel Tower, how­ever, that gave me an ir­re­sistible de­sire to live alone for a while, but every­thing that was done around, in­side, above and ad­ja­cent to it. Really — how could all the news­pa­pers speak to us of a new ar­chi­tec­ture in re­la­tion to this metal­lic car­cass? Because ar­chi­tec­ture, the least un­der­stood and the most for­got­ten of the arts to­day is per­haps also the most aes­thetic, the most mys­te­ri­ous and the most nour­ished with ideas.

Guy de Maupassant, The Wandering Life
(Originally cited on Occursus)