test

Hudson Yards Initial Impressions

I’ve migrated over here to wordpress, so here’s a post from my last blog:

I had some free time a while back, so I went over to Grand Central to see the exhibits for the five proposals for the Hudson Yards Development. The most surprising thing was that some of the developers put a full-time person at the exhibit to answer any questions. Definitely didn’t expect it, but it was a nice touch. Brookfield and Related had a representative there, and someone from Vornado/Durst showed up as I was leaving. Some of the models there were pretty misleading. Tishman Speyer and Related used “half-size” models; the footprints were drawn to scale, but all of the buildings were cut off above a certain height, so you wouldn’t get a sense of the true enormity of some of the proposals. Sneaky! My favorites thus far have been Brookfield’s and Extell’s proposals, which are actually the underdogs to the other three developers. The problem is that these two don’t have any corporate partners, while Conde Nast, Morgan Stanley, and News Corp have partnered up with the others. Brookfield has been the public favorite so far, and Extell was praised by a NY Times architecture critic. I’ll go into these at depth in a later post.

What I don’t get is why the MTA insisted on maintaining the “superblocks” instead of reintroducing the city grid. Brookfield actually broke the rules and did this, but their design is best. It surely will be easier for everybody to get around, and with the numerous new buildings going up, shouldn’t that be a concern? Sure the 7 line extension will help, but that’s still only one subway line for a 26 acre site filled with skyscrapers.

It won’t surprise me if the MTA decides to go with one developer for the East Yard and another for the West Yard to get two big corporations into the area instead of just one if they picked one developer for both sides. Somebody has to be considering that option in the MTA…