The Call of the Vessel

Hudson Yards

My favorite place to have an existential crisis is Hudson Yards. If you want to try it, below is the basic form that I follow. You should feel free to customize this experience however you want - build your own adventure! - but do let me know if you have any tips to further induce a sense of panic, nihilism, rage etc.

Get the Seven train to Hudson Yards. This is the one step I would strongly recommend you don’t skip. The escalator from the platform up to the street is very long, very austere, and on some days (if you are busy and don’t have a lot of time to ponder the futility of existence) this is all it will take to have you reaching for the Dostoyevsky.

You will emerge - eventually - in front of a building that cannot be described. It has no distinguishing features, decorative elements, pretension to architecture, or discernible human purpose. Like many of the buildings you will see, it is simply There. And it has lots of glass. This will be a theme: things that are There and Made of Glass. Turn right.

There is a confusing batch of concrete blocks and seemingly inaccessible grass to your left. After the slow and inexorable escalator (which has, hopefully, put you in mind of the meaningless march to death that we are all mindlessly performing) you need to focus.

Color beckons directly ahead. You must cross a small street that is very difficult to cross. But there it is. Behold the Vessel.

This inverted chrome honeycomb is belligerently placed between the Equinox Hotel (more of that later) and the mall (more of that, too). You can read about the suicides from this ‘staircase to nowhere’ in this Guardian article (no paywall), and the safety measures designed to stop people throwing themselves off the top of it.

The netting and the increased precautions came too late. But who could call this unexpected? Did everyone involved in this two-hundred-and-sixty-million-dollar pointlessness think that they were doing us a favor?

In Hudson Yards, they built the end of the world. They put a staircase to nowhere in the middle of it. It never occurred to them that it would make you want to kill yourself?

And now they won’t let you kill yourself. This, reader, is fascism manifest.

Moving on - resist the call of the void, the call of the Vessel (resist, damn you! Not today, no) - you can go left or right from here. If you go right, you’ll see the organic undulations of the Equinox Hotel entrance.

Full disclosure - my work, which rents an office in Hudson Yards, gives me a discounted rate to the gym. I am almost a regular here, but since it is only convenient when I go into the HY office, and I really don’t want to do that, I do not go enough to justify the cost. So why haven’t I cancelled it? Seriously, why? These are deep waters.

On to the hotel - why anyone would visit New York City and stay here, of all places, would require a level of cultural criticism spanning multiple volumes, but I can tell you about the gym: it’s fine.

I go after work, so sadly I miss the models and the yoga-moms, but I do get the investment wankers, lifting whilst having a conversation on their AirPods. Their conversations have about as much substance and purpose as Hudson Yards itself - in a place designed to do nothing but accommodate capital, simply having a conversation seems to be the point.

‘Are you going? (pause) Yeah Andy will be there. (pause) He spent $700 that night. (pause) Yeah Mike was there. (pause) I can’t go Tuesday, but maybe Wednesday? (pause) Yeah James said he’d come. (pause) Who did you go with? (pause) Oh, Olly was there? (pause) Yeah I can go (pause) Do you know if Dave was there? (pause) He was? (pause) Where did you go?

You get the idea. The regular pool is pretty nice, and even dares to glance in the direction of the neo-Victorian, with its slanted glass roof giving the tiniest hint of Kew’s famous greenhouse. The rooftop pool - mainly frequented by hotel guests and coconut-oiled influencers - is a mess, obviously, but I did once sell a guest pass to some desperate muppet outside the lobby, who gave me $200 for it. So there’s that.

Now, if you didn’t come here from the Vessel already, you will have to face the mall. But as you walk across from Equinox, look at the people around you. We are here, after all, to spiral - to realize that this whole charade is an elaborate distraction from decay, pointlessness, obsolescence - and consider the wall of death that each and every one of us slams into.

What do you see? The tourists wandering fatly (fatly wandering?) from Herald Square, since SoHo is too intimidating. The workers - surveilled and tracked, badged in and out, dashing for their corporate slop bowl between inane meetings. The expensive SUV’s, afforded as much space as pedestrians, picking up and dropping off their wealthy charges. And those few, like us, who haunt the place, wondering if it all really was better in the 1970’s.

Can you feel it yet? The urge to get away, to get to Verona, Seville, Westchester, Christ, anywhere - to go Home, wherever and whenever that was for you. Don't these awful glass monuments to capital, these towers of our sordid decline, make you miss your childhood? Is not the call of the Vessel, that shining staircase to nowhere, (not to mention those poor bastards who took the fast way down), truly emblematic of the fall from Innocence to Experience?

The mall is possibly the closest thing to the human that this place offers, in that you might ostensibly want to buy something. If you have serious money to spend - and why wouldn’t you, since they built this entire horror show for you - then enjoy the Tiffany, the Vuitton, the Van Cleef, the Chanel; IWC and Panerai maintain stores, and Watches of Switzerland has the rest of the Swiss brigade; the plebs are allowed their Zara and Uni-Qlo, their Lulu and Alo. You can get food at the ShakeShake, or at a (very) streamlined Eataly. You know what a mall is, of course you do - but did you consider that you needed one like this? As in, one paid for partly by the taxpayer? Next to a suicide kebab? You probably didn’t.

The rest of this tour I’ll leave to your own discretion - two other quick ideas to add to your mounting sense of dread are:

1. The faux town square made of anti-homeless architecture that they have dropped between Whole Foods and Peloton (inspired, no doubt, by Barcelona’s famed layout).
2. The ‘walk’ from the south side of the highline, which will take you on a asphalt trail to absolutely nowhere, where you can look down at the train depot and wonder if humans can love each other in such a place.

Apart from that, this is as close as I can come to the driving force, the animus (too far?) of what this place is all about. Envisaged by Michael Bloomberg - of course - as a place of, and I quote ‘cosmopolitan and cultural living’, it is a right-wing billionaires idea of what those two things are. You can spend money at the spa, you can buy a handbag, you can climb a big metal kebab, you can go to a food court - what’s not to like? Isn’t this a great day? And we haven’t seen a single homeless person!

David Harvey, the Marxist geographer who teach’s at CUNY (his best is The Limits to Capital) has a simple explanation to how Hudson Yards happened. Capital has to grow, it has to go somewhere. The IMF reports a surplus of liquidity every year - every year, come fire, famine, revolution or flood, there is money that needs to be spent. We don’t make buildings to live in anymore. We don’t even think about our apartments as a form of static or exchange value either - now, property is what we invest in. Why make anything beautiful, when it isn’t a structure for humans that you’re building - it is a receptacle for capital?

Harvey ends that particular interview with a moment of optimism - looking out over his shoulder at the grey, looming, Ayn Rand fantasy of sharp glass and sadness, he wonders about a better future. Will this whole place be kept as a curiosity? A monument to that strange time when we let the financiers and the capitalists stamp out our humanity? Will the violent glass erections that erupt from the earth be, in that better world, full of children playing, colorful pictures adorning the once sad and empty windows of some fluorescent corporate mausoleum?

I do not share his optimism. It will all get worse. At the time of writing, America is contemplating minting its first Trillionaire, and the White House is posting videos of ICE abductions set to the Pokémon theme song. It is proposed that Blackrock should help turn Gaza into a Kushner family approved beach resort. Respected actors sink to doing Walmart commercials, and JP Morgan shows off its new Eye of Sauron on Park Avenue. And by the time you read this, even these atrocities will be hopelessly out of date. The fire rises, brothers and sisters.

I do think it will get worse. But then, doesn’t everything? Or maybe I’m just getting old. A good friend of mine frequently accuses me, often fairly, of being Dramatic. But tell me, did you have a good existential crisis? If I may ask: are you there yet? Did you (be honest with me) finish?

Now get out of Hudson Yards. Come back whenever you feel too optimistic. Because this is the future they want. You emerge from the bowels of the earth, along with your fellow lost souls. Ferried upwards by the hum of Charon’s grey moving staircase. The sun is blocked by glass mega-structures. The lines of sight are disorienting. The people are climbing the safety-netted Vessel in their huddled masses, and the SUV’s just keep rolling up. Welcome to the Black Parade.