Developers Gone Wild

HUDSON YARDS, the new Manhattan mega-development, has become the poster child for urban projects that critics say harm the middle class. Is it time to change course?

- Adam Piore

THE REVIEWS FOR THE GLEAMING, ultra-posh New York development were bad. Police Academy 6 bad.

New York magazine’s architecture critic, Justin Davidson, wrote that every time he approached Hudson Yards he felt “a volatile mix of wonder and dejection roil in my chest.” He added, “I can’t help feeling like an alien here... I suppose this apotheosis of blank-slate affluence is someone’s fantasy of the 21-century city, but it isn’t mine.”

Davidson wasn’t alone.

Hudson Yards “is, at heart, a supersized suburban-style office park, with a shopping mall and a quasi-gated condo community targeted at the 0.1 percent,” Michael Kimmelman of The New York Times wrote of the 26-acre development on the West Side of Manhattan. “It gives physical form to a crisis of city leadership, asleep at the wheel through two administrations, and to a pernicious theory of civic welfare that presumes private development in New York’s primary goal, the truest measure of urban vitality and health, with money the city’s only real currency.”

The project is the brainchild of Stephen Ross, the 78-year-old billionaire developer, and owner of the Miami Dolphins football team. At $25 billion, Hudson Yards—featuring stores like Cartier and Dior, $32 million penthouses and sleek office towers—is billed as the largest mixed-use project in North American history and touted as the epitome of urban development.

“We saw that what New York needed was a new neighborhood, where you could live, work and play, that would attract the best and the brightest,” Ross said at the opening day ceremony in March.