It was a public design fail that took all of five days to get resolved.
On January 10th, New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman reported that Hudson Yards developer Related Companies had been talking about a plan to erect a 700-foot-long wall that would overshadow the High Line and ostensibly obscure what is intended to become a sprawling public lawn built atop the open tracks between 11th and 12th Avenues, from West 30th to West 33rd Streets, also known as the Western Yard. In the story, Related called the conversations with elected and community officials “very, very preliminary." But on January 15th, it issued a denial in a series of tweets, saying, "There has never been a wall along the High Line and there will never be a wall."
The only problem was that there were several officials who attested to seeing renderings of the wall—and it was later discovered that an architectural model of the project displayed inside the Hudson Yards mall happened to also incorporate a wall exactly along the area facing the High Line. By Friday, the model was spotted being hauled out of the sales gallery. The developer did not respond to a request for comment.
But wall or no wall, the flare-up has proven to be a public relations headache for Related, compounding the overall design criticism of its unprecedented 28-acre private development. It also exposed the inherent challenges that have historically dogged New York City and which still lie ahead. As the demand for better and more sustainable public space grows, how do city officials ensure that private developers who are mandated or incentivized to build them will create something that truly has the public interest at heart, especially, when in the case of Hudson Yards, the development has been viewed as a bastion for the wealthy?
"There's an axiomatic tension between private ownership and requirement of public use," said Jerold Kayden, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design who wrote a book called Privately Owned Public Space: The New York City Experience.
Although the distinction sometimes gets elided, Kayden explained, "These are not city owned parks. These are privately owned spaces that are required to be open to the public."
What that means, he added, is the owners "don’t necessarily love their public space."
Although the term has been used more broadly in recent years to include public spaces at planned developments like Hudson Yards, the original concept of "privately owned public spaces," known as POPS for short, goes back to a 1961 zoning regulation that allowed private owners to build out extra floor area in return for carving out some publicly available space in the form of public plazas or atriums or indoor amenities like conference rooms.
There are today more than 550 POPS in New York City. But as Kayden and others have discovered, the spaces have yielded a mixed bag of public amenities. Although they are legally public, private property owners have a tendency to either annex these designated public spaces or allow them to fall into neglect. In 2017, city comptroller Scott Stringer revealed the results of an audit that examined 333 POPS and found that 182, or more than half, were not in compliance with the zoning regulation.
The city has in recent years beefed up its oversight of POPS, calling for regular inspections by the Department of Buildings as well as requiring signage and allowing more seating and tables in places where they were not before permitted. In a project with the Municipal Arts Society, Kayden manages a website that allows the public to locate and submit their own comments on the city's POPS.
The uneven outcomes and difficulties in the regulation of POPS are similar to the challenges the city has in having to hold developers accountable for public spaces or parks in larger planned developments. In the case of Hudson Yards, which has its own master plan, Kayden said the policing mechanism is in the approval documents.
"If a developer’s obligation is not adequately recorded in documents whether they are written or visual documents, then the public has already been shortchanged. Because it makes it very difficult down the line to force the developer to do something that is not an obligation of the developer," he said.
But contracts and agreements can spell out only so much. For all the specificity in the zoning resolution dedicated to the 5.45 acres of public space, it is still not clear if there was anything in the rules that would have prohibited a wall, as the Times story noted. Which is why some critics reject the notion of privately built public spaces entirely.
"The bottom line is that the term is a contradiction: nothing privately owned, privately controlled and privately shaped can be termed public in any way shape or form," said Roberta Gratz, an urban planning writer. "This is just another form of giveaway to private interests."
But Philip Winn, a vice president at Project for Public Spaces, a nonprofit group that advises cities on creating public spaces, disagreed. In his experience he did not see a correlation in the success of privately built or publicly built public spaces. There are good examples of both, he asserted.
Ultimately, he said the problem with Related was that the developer had been given "too long a leash." He argued that the wall was a flagrant violation because the vision of creating a connection between the Western Yard and the High Line was one of the ways the developer sold Hudson Yards "as one way in which the development is linked in to the public life of the city."
From a spatial and operational standpoint, Winn said Hudson Yards, which ignores the city's street grid design, has felt much more like a private enclave. And while Vessel, the 150-foot-high climbable steel structure at the center of the public space, has attracted a lot of Instagram attention, its incorporation runs counter to creating a large flexible civic gathering space at Hudson Yards.
"When we look at the history of this development and its priorities, it’s been so consistently outside of what people would call namely for the public good," he said.
State Senator Brad Hoylman, who was among the elected officials who criticized Related's wall concept, said, "I think most New Yorkers are flatly disappointed by the outcome," he said, referring to the public space built so far.
Given the precedent, he added, "We needed to come down rather hard on any notion that public space would be limited."
For some, these battles are par for the course. Alexander Garvin, an architect and urban planner who advised five city administrations, has worked on and seen iterations of the Hudson Yards going back decades.
"There are hundreds of plans going back to 1929," he said.
Reflecting on Hudson Yards, he called the introduction of Vessel "an unfortunate decision," but also praised the fact that a project had finally been realized that essentially extends Midtown Manhattan.
He dismissed the fight over the wall as just one of many that go on in the background between developers and the community over public spaces.
What was different, he said, was the fact that this conflict was made public in an article written by an architecture critic. And, more importantly, that it succeeded in getting the developer to withdraw its plans.
That happens sometimes, he reflected. "But I rarely see it happen so quickly," he added.
