Vessel (Hudson Yards)

Hudson Yards is the most expensive private real estate development in American history — twenty-five billion dollars spent building a neighbourhood from scratch on a platform over an active rail yard on Manhattan's far West Side.

The centrepiece, Vessel, is a sixteen-storey structure consisting of one hundred and fifty-four interconnected flights of stairs — two thousand five hundred individual steps and eighty landings — designed by Thomas Heatherwick. It looks like a giant honeycomb, or a bronze beehive, or an Escher drawing made real. It opened in March twenty nineteen and was free to climb.

The structure was closed in twenty twenty-one after three suicides. It reopened in twenty twenty-four with mandatory partners and a twenty-dollar entry fee. The debate about whether it is a masterpiece or an expensive vanity project has never been resolved.

Love it or hate it, the engineering is extraordinary — the entire development sits on a platform built over thirty active train tracks serving Penn Station. The platform alone weighs more than the Eiffel Tower.