Michael Kimmelman

NEW YORK — Even half-done, Essex Crossing, on the Lower East Side, is shaping up as one of New York’s most promising new mixed-use developments — the anti-Hudson Yards.

A $1.9 billion, 6-acre, for-profit mega-project occupying several blocks around Delancey Street where traffic barrels onto and off the Williamsburg Bridge, it replaces what had been a vast no-man’s land and gaping civic wound with new subsidized apartments, a bushel of community perks, parkland, a movie multiplex, office and retail space for local businesses and a capacious new home for the city-owned Essex Market.

Launched a decade ago during the Bloomberg administration, shepherded through the de Blasio years by New York’s Economic Development Corporation and master-planned by SHoP and Beyer Blinder Belle, two big city-based architecture firms, Essex Crossing results from long years of ground-up neighborhood consultation and holistic planning. If you have been anywhere near the Lower East Side lately you could hardly have failed to notice the egregious new supertall that the opportunistic developer called Extell has imposed some blocks away along the waterfront around the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges.

Other developers are now bidding to erect more towers there. Taking advantage of anomalous zoning regulations, these projects have provoked some very loud, angry protests from residents who feel the buildings are being shoved down the throats of a largely poor, immigrant, low- and mid-rise community.

By contrast, while some Lower East Siders remain leery, a relative lack of vocal opposition to Essex Crossing since 2013 — when a consortium of developers and investors calling themselves Delancey Street Associates won the competition to do the project — seems testament to the virtue and value of arduous, upfront negotiations and plans. This may come as close as we can now get, in a political system obeisant to private enterprise, to balancing equity with gentrification.

You might ask: Is this how things should work? Democratic presidential candidates have been arguing the question in terms of health care and wealth taxes. Here, the issue is housing. During the Reagan era, federal authorities got out of the business of constructing public housing, offering private developers tax credits in return for building affordable units. The developers, properly regulated, were supposed to profit from their own efficiency while cities would benefit from the addition of more mixed-income housing.

The process depended on a responsive, vigilant government. A new report by the New York City Department of City Planning shows housing production in the metro area is falling increasingly short of job growth. The area produced 2.2 new housing units per net new job between 2001 and 2008; just 0.3 units last year.

With widening inequity and runaway rents outpacing many cities’ ability to produce more subsidized homes, there is a growing call on the left for government to do more. But government can be slow, inept and profligate just as private developers can rake in tax breaks without always delivering on promised benefits.

At Essex Crossing, the city and developers seemed to have operated on the same wavelength, so the process worked. Four of the nine buildings are now finished. Consulted about optics, local residents said they didn’t want monolithic brick towers, which might remind them of 1960s and 70s public housing. They didn’t much like Bernard Tschumi’s shapely but garish blue-glass luxury condo tower, either — its arrival in the neighborhood a dozen years ago seemed to plant an incongruous flag for colonizing bourgeoisie — so they didn’t want tons more glass and gloss.

In response, Essex Crossing’s boxy, mostly bland exteriors are variously clad in brick and metal by a variety of architects. Handel Architects has devised the project’s centerpiece, the 26-story Essex, a half market rate, half subsidized rental tower, with 195 apartments. Its podium makes room for a 14-screen cineplex, the largest organic rooftop farm in Manhattan and for the Essex Market, with the first phase of a new enterprise called the Market Line in the basement.

Nearby, the Rollins is a 15-story, L-shaped, umber-colored brick residential slab by Beyer Blinder Belle, with a Target and the East Coast’s largest Trader Joe’s at its base along with a nice new pocket park designed by West 8, the Dutch firm that landscaped Governors Island, just to the north. Dattner Architects designed the 14-story, 100% affordable Frances Goldin Senior Apartments, around the corner, which includes a new medical center.

And SHoP conceived the twisty 14-story mixed-income condo project called 242 Broome, whose shimmery facade in anodized aluminum changes color with the shifting light, picking up on the sepias of nearby brick buildings, the blue of the sky. Architecturally the most memorable design, 242 leans over the sidewalk to the west and steps out toward the street-wall on the south, bonding on the north like a conjoined twin with a new home (opening in January, fingers crossed) for the International Center of Photography, whose entrance is a transparent glass curtain wall framed like an old Polaroid snapshot.

This stretch of the Lower East Side used to be called the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area. During the 1950s, the city’s powerful planning czar, Robert Moses, decided to bulldoze dozens of old tenements. These were buildings where, years before, Jewish and Italian immigrants settled, replaced by African Americans and Latinos. Through the early 1970s, the demolitions displaced some 1,800 poor and working-class families, most of them Puerto Rican, turning homes into vacant lots.

The city promised to replace the lots with new low-income dwellings. But for years Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, in cahoots with William E. Rapfogel, who ran the taxpayer-financed Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, conspired to thwart redevelopment proposals floated by local housing advocates because they threatened to undo Silver’s Jewish voting base.

Mayor after mayor failed to make headway. Ultimately, Silver was convicted on corruption charges, Rapfogel went to prison for a kickback scheme and a path cleared for Essex Crossing, which finally makes good on the city’s half-century-old promise. Among its provisions: The project sets aside subsidized apartments for tenants evicted all those years ago who now want to return. Most have moved away or no longer qualify for aid or have died. But nearly 30 former residents have come back.

In all, Essex Crossing creates 1,079 new apartments, more than half permanently designated for low- and middle-income tenants, a percentage much higher than the city’s inclusionary zoning rules require. Apartments selling for millions now mix with ones for families of two earning as little as $15,000 a year, and some for those earning zero.

To mollify skeptics, developers front-loaded community benefits like a new senior center, new quarters for the Chinese-American Planning Council, which offers early childhood education programs, and for the Lower East Side’s Henry Street Settlement to do work force development. A stylish new cafe called the GrandLo opened last year, operated by the century-old Grand Street Settlement as a nonprofit job training site for local at-risk youth.

In concert with the local school district, Essex Crossing started after school classes that introduce teens to the ins and outs of the construction and development businesses. Project EATS manages the organic farm, which serves up free food and wellness instruction to seniors, families and children.

Most conspicuously, the project gives Essex Market a sprawling new home. The storied Lower East Side fixture evolved from a mess of open-air pushcarts at the turn of the 20th century selling pickles, herring and hats. In 1940, Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia moved the market indoors, to what became its famous but increasingly dingy, squalid quarters north of Delancey. Designed by SHoP on the ground floor of the Essex, the sleek new Essex Market opened this spring at more than double the size of the old market. It’s a spectacle of bespoke stalls, with subsidized rents for legacy vendors. Exploiting the sloped contour of the movie theater seating above, the market gets loads of light, pouring in through soaring windows revealed by the angled, white, sculptured ceiling, which yields space for mezzanine-level seating and a sunny, glassed-in teaching kitchen.

Come Thanksgiving, ribbons will be cut on the inaugural tranche of vendors at the Market Line, in the basement of the Essex. Three-quarters of the vendors are immigrant, minority or women-owned businesses, half from the Lower East Side. They include local favorites like the Pickle Guys, Nom Wah, Ends Meat, Veselka and Essex Pearl.

Rents for the market’s lower-margin businesses will be supported by its high-margin ones, akin to the way mixed-income housing works. When built out, the Market Line will eventually host homegrown art and clothes merchants, a music space and will stretch three blocks underground all the way from Essex to Clinton Streets.

I checked out the construction site not long ago. The décor is New York after a rain at night: all shiny black brick and polished concrete beneath an unfinished ceiling. Sunlight filters through street-level windows at the Delancey Street entrance and via the wide, open staircase that spills down from the Essex Market. The brick and concrete will disappear behind signage and the hordes of shoppers and noshers expected to come, hunting down bauernwurst from Schaller &amp; Weber, the old-time Yorkville butcher, and alcapurrias from a Puerto Rican newcomer called Que Chevere, part of whose profits, customers are told, will benefit Autism Speaks.

The project’s developers expect to rake in plenty of cash from all the market-rate condos, apartment rentals and commercial office and retail spaces. Rising real estate values on the Lower East Side have accelerated neighborhood gentrification but also helped subsidize the project’s abundance of affordable housing and community services.

I was curious to learn that Mayor Bill de Blasio hasn’t yet showed up for any of the official openings at Essex Crossing. Its profitability makes a good argument for demanding more in the way of public benefits from other large-scale private developments.

At the same time, the project is a reminder that what can seem like kneejerk public resistance to new developments, even ones that promise affordable housing, can’t simply be chalked up to NIMBYism. If residents don’t know how, or whether, a project fits into some shared, participatory, longer-term vision for a neighborhood, then the most modest new condo tower can become a call to the barricades.

Essex Crossing earned its community buy-in by delivering on promised benefits upfront. That’s still no substitute for city planning.

But it points toward a better way.

This article originally appeared in

(Critic’s Notebook)

Essex Crossing Is the Anti-Hudson Yards

NEW YORK — In 1939, the Museum of Modern Art opened its first purpose-built home on West 53rd Street, a rectangular, six-story International Style palazzo clad in Thermolux glass and panels of milky white marble.

Stylish and surprisingly homey, the building, designed by Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, replaced four old brownstones. The neighborhood was mostly low-rise and residential back then, full of limestone row houses and Beaux-Arts town houses. The Goodwin-Stone building landed on prewar 53rd Street like a UFO, planting the flag for modernism.

Ever since, the museum has ballooned on site. That’s never an easy thing to do in the middle of a busy block in the middle of Midtown. The story of the Modern, art aside, is one of those classic, ruthless New York real estate tales. The museum has gobbled up properties, conspired with developers, erected skyscrapers, torn down buildings in its way, built new ones and then sometimes torn those down too to make room for another reboot. During the ’50s and ’60s, Philip Johnson was in charge of expansions. During the ’80s, it was Cesar Pelli; in 2004, Yoshio Taniguchi.

Along the way, the Modern did a lot to transform 53rd Street into what is today a canyon of glass and steel that can bring to mind the headquarters of Darth Vader’s hedge fund.

Only 15 years after its last growth spurt, the Modern has now completed its latest metamorphosis. It’s smart, surgical, sprawling and slightly soulless.

The architects this time are Diller Scofidio + Renfro, in collaboration with the global giant Gensler. DS+R, among other things, refurbished Lincoln Center and helped conceive the High Line and the Shed at Hudson Yards.

It has become a cliché and something of a crisis that art museums, along with a few commercial galleries, now believe they need to go big or go home, vying for our divided attention. The Modern has spent $450 million during the current makeover to add another 47,000 square feet of gallery space. Its goal is to show more of the vast collection but also partly to ease congestion by dispersing visitors around a bigger campus. Attendance, which was 1 million visitors per year during the 1970s, topped 2 million after Taniguchi, and reached 3 million by 2010, holding pretty much steady ever since. Taniguchi’s expansion squandered oodles of square footage on a dubious second-floor atrium, funneling visitors along narrow, aerial passageways and escalators that filled up like the 6 Train at rush hour.

Expansions tend to bring larger crowds. Transportation experts call the phenomenon induced demand: The more lanes you add to a traffic-jammed highway, the more cars will inevitably arrive to fill them.

Now comes the Modern’s westward push, which opens to the public on Oct. 21. We got a hint of its aesthetic when the architects unveiled their redo of the Goodwin-Stone interior a couple of years ago, repurposing upstairs galleries for temporary exhibitions, elegantly reconstructing the original Bauhaus staircase with steps that seemed to float on paper-thin sheets of steel and carving a lounge out of the new garden-facing lobby, filling it with Charlotte Perriand sofas and Grand Antique marble. It was all beautifully detailed and bolder than Taniguchi’s palette, if not much warmer.

MoMA’s new galleries pick up some of the same themes. They head west nearly half a block, through what used to be the American Folk Art Museum’s site and into the base of 53W53, a new supertall by Jean Nouvel. The exhibition spaces are what you’d expect: handsome white boxes, big and flexible, flowing into and out of Taniguchi’s galleries. The expansion in effect stretches like Silly Putty the existing circuit of rooms, spread across three floors, where MoMA unfurls its permanent collection.

Nouvel’s building, with its faceted geometry, nicely tapered profile and crisscrossing beams, has risen on land the museum sold some years ago to the development firm Hines, in return for space in the tower’s base. For the Modern, seamless access both into and out of 53W53 ultimately always depended on bulldozing the Folk Art Museum, a flawed but serendipitous sliver of a building designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, with a textured, tooled-bronze facade, the last architectural outlier on 53rd Street. Its demolition justly enraged many advocates of contemporary architecture.

How you judge current MoMA expansion may depend on whether you buy into the museum’s Manifest Destiny argument.

The architects have replaced Folk Art with a Jenga-like arrangement of sectionally linked exhibition and performance spaces facing onto 53rd Street. The spaces include a sound studio and ground-floor galleries for changing displays that will be free to anyone who walks in, visible, like a shop window, from outside.

I had my doubts about these galleries when they were first announced. They seemed a vague excuse to burrow a passageway to the Nouvel building. But they turned out to be one of the best parts of the expansion, making possible new programming at the museum and gesturing, in a way much of the rest of the museum doesn’t quite manage, toward the city at large.

In Taniguchi’s 2004 renovation, visitors entered through a tunnellike lobby that stretched between 53rd and 54th Streets. They checked coats and turned east into a tall vestibule facing the sculpture garden. The sequence of compression and release was a nice idea, exploiting the centrality of the museum’s garden. But the tunnel was about as inviting as an airport concourse.

In the new configuration, a canopy, sleek as a knife, now cantilevers over the 53rd Street sidewalk to signal more clearly the museum’s presence. A datum plane, subtly inserted just above the ground floor window level, attempts to tie MoMA’s episodic facades together. Inside, the architects raised the ceiling of Taniguchi’s lobby on the south side, moving a gift shop into the basement to allow unobstructed views toward the new West Wing and punching windows into second-floor exhibition spaces.

You may feel like you’re entering an Apple store. Everything is crisp and coolly engineered. “Hello. Again.” is painted on a long white wall, recalling an Apple tagline. From the ticket desk signs point you toward what’s on view in the Taniguchi building to the east and also in the galleries to the west, where a bank of elevators and a staircase beckon.

The staircase is clad in suave, stained panels of micro-perforated bird’s-eye maple, cantilevered from a slender sheet of steel connected to the ceiling, the whole thing suspended almost like a mobile. On the top floor is a Danny Meyer restaurant with a terrace, art, a black-felt ceiling and more Grand Antique marble. It replaces the ill-conceived cafe at the fifth-floor entrance to the galleries in the Taniguchi building, where the smell of shrimp and asparagus soup mingled with the Seurats and Cézannes.

Much is now being made of the fact that the new, enlarged circuit of permanent collection galleries with its multiple entry points dovetails with the Modern’s updated mission. Gone are the days when the museum told a single story about modern art as a sequence of -isms, expressed in linear fashion. It was, arguably, a seductive story, like a tale by Borges. But there is no single, vectored history of modernism. There are many diverse histories, which visitors can now discover as they choose.

Of course we’ve heard this before. “We cannot say any longer that we are handicapped by lack of space or equipment or technology,” one of the museum’s chief curators told The New York Times on the occasion of the Modern’s 1980s supersizing. “We have enough exhibit space, storage space and study space so that our primary problem now is love, talent, energy and passion.”

Actually, the problem back then turned out to be that Pelli’s expansion transformed the Modern into what looked like a suburban shopping mall. It didn’t solve the problems of space, modernism or love. And neither did the expansion that replaced it.

I suspect droves of visitors to the new Modern will still try to make a beeline for “The Starry Night.” They’ll want to know where the museum starts. Sociologists and executives at Trader Joe’s will tell you that consumers don’t actually like having too many choices. The new layout will require lots of signs, staff in the halls to direct people, apps and maps. We’ll see if visitors find it liberating or confusing.

What the architects have done is refined and tactical. It marginalizes the garden, which is a pity. The garden is the historic heart of MoMA. Maybe that’s one reason, for all its intelligence and skill and its obvious desire to make the place feel friendlier, the expansion seems to me not to have solved the problem of the Modern’s ambience.

I have sometimes gone through a thought exercise, as the museum cycled through its previous two expansions: What if, instead of doubling down on Midtown, it had, like, say, the Whitney, ventured to Brooklyn or Queens or the West Side. New York is multicentered now. The Modern could have been reborn. It could have altered the city’s cultural weather.

Officials at the museum tell me they anticipate this latest revamp will bump attendance up to around 3.5 million visitors a year. No doubt, after some time it will reboot again. Richard Oldenburg, the museum’s director during the Pelli enlargement, described the Modern as “a place where you can see the whole development of the modern movement, but which you feel you can still capture, at least remotely, on a single visit.”

This is no longer that museum, as the current director, Glenn D. Lowry, acknowledged the other day. “It’s always going to be a work in progress,” he said.

Fair enough, I suppose. A work in progress, like the Modern’s architecture and the idea of modernism itself.

With a $450 Million Expansion, MoMA Is Bigger. Is That Better?

NEW YORK — Against a phalanx of mostly dreary new apartment towers, the soon-to-open Hunters Point Community Library by Steven Holl Architects is a diva parading along the East River in Queens, south of the famous Pepsi sign. With its sculptured geometry — a playful advertisement for itself — it’s even a little like the Pepsi sign.

Compact, at 22,000 square feet and 82 feet high, the library is among the finest and most uplifting public buildings New York has produced so far this century.

It also cost something north of $40 million and took forever to complete. So it raises the question: Why can’t New York build more things like this, faster and cheaper?

Opening Sept. 24, Hunters Point is surely what Queens Library officials and the borough’s former president, Helen M. Marshall, had in mind when the project was proposed more than 15 years ago: a crown jewel among Queens branches, at a singular, symbolic spot facing the United Nations and Louis Kahn’s exalted Four Freedoms Park across the water.

On dark days and evenings, its enormous, eccentric windows will act like inviting beacons of light, attracting eyes and feet. They carve whimsical jigsaw puzzle pieces out of a cool, silvered-concrete facade.

That facade is a load-bearing structure, allowing the library’s liberated interior to spiral some 60 feet upward and outward from a shallow canyon-like lobby, unfolding in elevation as a sequence of tiered desks, book stacks and social spaces. The inside is mostly warm bamboo, with spectacular views.

Outside, there’s a lovely new triangular ginkgo garden, a kind of mini-Place Dauphine, by Michael Van Valkenburgh. For a growing, diverse community, the whole project is an instant boon and a locus of neighborhood pride for Long Island City.

Over the years, it became a poster child for the perils of public architecture in New York, as if the ambition of its design and not the city’s broken bureaucracy was to blame for the library’s extended timetable and escalating budget.

From the start, pea counters in the city’s Office of Management and Budget didn’t see why Hunters Point needed a big fancy library, notwithstanding all the new apartment towers going up, bringing in droves of young families. The pea counters held the project up. Delays raised costs.

I spoke with Chris McVoy, a partner at Steven Holl Architects. (Steven Holl was the library’s architect; Olaf Schmidt, the project architect; McVoy also played a key role.) McVoy defended the city, blaming the troubles mostly on complications with construction.

There were specific obstacles like the resignation of the former Queens library president, a big backer and fundraiser for the building, and a dockworkers strike in Spain that held up glass shipments. Credit goes to the local City Council member, Jimmy Van Bramer, a former library official, who helped keep the project alive when City Hall seemed ready to let it die.

Whatever the specifics in this case, the issues around public architecture in the city are bigger than Hunters Point. It’s not hard to find architects, clients, builders, public officials and others familiar with the city’s capital construction program ready to unleash symphonic tirades about New York’s crazy procurement rules, about the petty, internecine squabbles among city agencies, about the city-required shotgun marriages between architects and contractors, the costly and onerous liability regulations, notoriously late payments and a vast, sclerotic bureaucracy that squanders millions of tax dollars by causing needless, yearslong delays in the name of value engineering, then scapegoats architects.

What’s supposed to safeguard taxpayers’ money and the public interest ends up doing the reverse.

Following the lead of the federal government, New York during the Bloomberg years started the Design Excellence Program to inject architectural distinction into public buildings. The Queens Public Library system became an early adopter.

A prequalified list of local architects was compiled. Architects big, medium and small signed up for the privilege and opportunity. Gifted young firms got to burnish their portfolios. Slowly, New York began to produce some remarkable public buildings (fire and police stations, libraries, housing projects) — architecture worthy of the city, which helped spread beauty and dignity in far-flung neighborhoods.

Architects were willing to run the gauntlet of bureaucracy back then because they had design champions like David Burney, who oversaw the Department of Design and Construction for the city.

Today, City Hall has all but abandoned design excellence. A disconnected mayor demonstrates zero interest in good design or architecture or much of anything related to the physical fabric of the city and urban planning.

I toured Hunters Point with Thomas J. Foley, deputy commissioner of the DDC. He acknowledged problems with the city’s construction process, lamenting the lack of a preapproved “excellence” list for contractors, or some equivalent filter to weed out the bottom feeders in construction and attract better firms.

Jobs are now awarded to the lowest “responsible” bidders, which effectively means the lowest bidders. An architect on the excellence roster recently described to me a project on which the low bid was from a contractor with a long record of failure. The DDC had just put the contractor on notice for the company’s inability to complete other projects, the architect said. Needless to say, the contractor got the job anyway. With predictable results.

How can the city attract good builders if the hiring process favors bottom feeders?

Or attract the best architects if the city often strips them of basic tools they employ to ensure the work is carried out properly?

The city also does its budgeting year-by-year. How can any public agency plan a multiyear building project when it can’t even be sure the money it needs will be there?

No wonder the golden ticket for many city agencies is the so-called “pass through” contract, which means a project has received ample private funding up front and is being overseen by an organization responsible and competent enough to handle construction itself. A few weeks ago, the New York Public Library unveiled its new Van Cortlandt branch in the Bronx. Library officials made sure to structure the financing to get the pass through.

Construction was completed on time and on budget.

Which means the city can clearly do better.

Earlier this year, DDC’s current commissioner, Lorraine Grillo, released “A Strategic Blueprint for Construction Excellence.” It outlines a plan to eliminate redundant reviews and reduce costly delays, holding contractors to higher standards. That all sounds great — if it also guarantees good design isn’t shortchanged.

At Hunters Point, construction workers were putting the finishing touches on the ground-floor community room when I visited; cushy furniture had been moved into the sunny teen area, smartly quarantined on an upper story and partly cordoned off with glass, to buffer sound.

Chairs at the adult desks are by Jean Prouvé. They’re by Aalto in the big, two-story children’s wing, on the south end of the building, cozily nestled inside a bamboo-paneled sling bulging over the lobby. The children’s wing is among the nicest and most artful spaces I have seen in any new library building. A big eyelid window, beautifully sculptured, on the wing’s second floor frames a killer view over Gantry Plaza State Park, with Manhattan in the background.

From the lobby I climbed the zigzagging stairs that trace the funny, lively, meandering incision cut into the library’s west wall by the huge central window overlooking Manhattan, the stairs ascending past stepped tiers of desks and upper floors that seem to float as if in midair. As the building rises there is a constant shifting of forms and views, a weightlessness and dynamism. The staircase summits on a roof terrace with bleachers overlooking the city.

New York deserves an engaged and mindful government that grasps the virtues of good design and what it can do for communities. “When it is good,” as critic Ada Louise Huxtable wrote half a century ago, “this is a city of fantastic strength, sophistication and beauty.”

It is the sort of city that produces public buildings of substance and whimsy like Hunters Point library. And doesn’t take decades and squander fortunes to do so.

Why Can't New York City Build More Gems Like This Queens Library?

(Critic's Notebook)

Opening on Tuesday, Hunters Point is surely what Queens Library officials and the borough’s former president, Helen M. Marshall, had in mind when the project was proposed more than 15 years ago: a crown jewel among Queens branches, at a singular, symbolic spot facing the United Nations and Louis Kahn’s exalted Four Freedoms Park across the water.

A Late-Blooming Crown Jewel in Queens

The largest mixed-use private real estate venture in American history, it is called Hudson Yards.

The first massive tower emerged at the apex of the High Line, looming over it, a shingled, spiky, reflective blue-glass behemoth, shaped by eccentric cuts and angles, as if sheared by a giant Ginsu knife.

Since then, at jaw-dropping magnitudes you can’t begin to grasp until you are actually standing there, the sprawling site has sprouted a seven-story, 720,000-square-foot shopping mall. There are also four more supertall skyscrapers as well as a $500 million city-sponsored arts center called the Shed, featuring a giant sliding roof, eye-catchingly swathed in a tufted Teflon-based sheeting that can bring to mind inflated dry cleaning bags.

It is temporarily called the Vessel. Hoping for public buy-in, its patron, the lead developer of this vast neoliberal Zion, has invited suggestions for a new name.

Purportedly inspired by ancient Indian stepwells (it’s about as much like them as Skull Mountain at Six Flags Great Adventure is like Chichen Itza) the object — I hesitate to call this a sculpture — is a 150-foot-high, $200 million, latticed, wastebasket-shaped stairway to nowhere, sheathed in a gaudy, copper-cladded steel.

It preens along the critical axis between the High Line and the newish No. 7 subway station at Hudson Yards, hoping to drum up Instagram views and foot traffic for the mall, casting egregious shadows over what passes for public open space, ruinously manspreading beside the Shed, the most novel work of architecture on site, and the only building the private developers didn’t build.

New York politics and real estate are notoriously akin to “Rashomon”: Any verdict on an undertaking as costly and complex as Hudson Yards depends on one’s perspective.

For its advocates, the $25 billion development is a shining new city ex nihilo, a wellspring of future tax revenues and evidence of a miraculous, post-9/11 civic volte-face. They note how the project sailed through the public and environmental review processes, winning neighborhood approval partly because at the time it seemed better than an earlier proposal to erect a sports stadium on the site, partly because it was conceived when New York still feared for its economic future and lagged, in terms of Grade A office space, behind global competitors like London.

As a feat of engineering, it rests on a new $1 billion platform, which decks over a stretch of infrastructure that for generations acted as a kind of Nowhereland on the West Side. Nowhereland is now making way for what promises to be 16 new buildings, including some 4,000 new apartments, a school, parkland and upward of 55,000 jobs. Slightly more than 10 percent of those apartments will be subsidized housing (some 430 apartments), with more such housing underway or already built by the developers off-site — 1,309 subsidized apartments in total.

Now occupying the eastern end of the rail yards, the project will ultimately cover 28 acres when the western half is finished — an undertaking that has preoccupied two of the world’s largest private real estate developers, Related Companies, led by its chairman, Stephen M. Ross, and Oxford Properties Group.

Already, a who’s who of blue-chip hedge funds, law firms and other corporations — SAP, KKR, BlackRock, Wells Fargo, L’Oréal USA, the list goes on — have chosen to move in or will do, when yet another giant office tower, now underway, is completed. WarnerMedia and CNN are migrating from the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle, Related’s earlier high-end, mixed-use, mall-centered venture. Star chefs, including Thomas Keller and David Chang (also Columbus Circle tenants), will run restaurants at Hudson Yards, where Neiman Marcus, Cartier, Dior, Gucci, Fendi and more of the usual suspects hope to defy obvious retail trends.

Not yet joining the caravan are companies like Google, Twitter and Facebook. Related’s antiseptic, inward-turning, glass-tower formula doesn’t seem to speak to the tastes of cutting edge industries or younger, urban-minded millennials.

Ninety percent of Hudson Yards’ office tenants, according to a recent study by the New School, are transfers from midtown, lured by lucrative tax breaks provided by New York politicians to the developers. Moving from midtown, investment company BlackRock, which manages $5.98 trillion, will be able to write off $25 million in state tax credits if it adds 700 jobs at Hudson Yards.

The terms du jour are corporate welfare or socialism for billionaires. City officials sold Hudson Yards to New Yorkers as a self-financing venture. That’s not what it may sound like. The city and state provided tax incentives and poured billions of public dollars into an extension of the No. 7 subway line and into acres of open space around the yards — investments presumably benefiting everyone, which the project is supposed to pay back by increasing New York’s gross domestic product.

We’ll see how and when that happens. As the New School study documents, so far the project is shifting economic development from other neighborhoods to Hudson Yards without creating new net growth.

That said, this shift has spurred more developers to build their own mega-towers near the yards. A new place is emerging.

The question is, what sort of place?

And this is the immediate problem with Hudson Yards.

It 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. A relic of dated 2000s thinking, nearly devoid of urban design, it declines to blend into the city grid. From a distance the project may remind you of glass shards on top of a wall.

It offers 14 acres of public open space in return for privatizing the last precious undeveloped parcel of significant size in Manhattan. But the open space looks like it may end up being mostly a fancy drive-thru drop-off for the shopping mall, a landscaped plaza overshadowed by office towers and, for the coming western yards, a scattering of high-rise apartment buildings around a lawn — in effect, a version of a 1950s towers-in-the-park housing complex, except designed by big-name architects.

And while those apartment buildings look to be less enormous than the supertalls that have gone up so far, stepping down toward the river, the whole site lacks any semblance of human scale. With its focus on the buildings’ shiny envelopes, on the monotony of reflective blue glass and the sheen of polished wood, brass, leather, marble and stone, Hudson Yards glorifies a kind of surface spectacle — as if the peak ambitions of city life were consuming luxury goods and enjoying a smooth, seductive, mindless materialism.

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 is New York’s primary goal, the truest measure of urban vitality and health, with money the city’s only real currency.

The triumph of this view is a consequence of government’s dwindling capacity to plan, build or repair anything significant itself. City Hall, which demonstrates no grasp of urban design, doesn’t do planning, vaguely requiring half the acreage at Hudson Yards be open space but leaving Ross to decide what that means.

He hired architects at Kohn Pedersen Fox, the global firm, to come up with a masterplan but clearly they just did what he wanted, starting with the design of the superblock along 10th Avenue, consisting of the two shingled, busily faceted blue-glass office towers called 10 and 30 Hudson Yards. They flank the shopping mall, with an interior by Elkus Manfredi.

Collaborating with Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo &amp; Associates, KPF was also tapped to design 55 Hudson Yards — at 800 feet tall, the smallest office building on the site, with a facade of transparent glass, cloaked in a grid of curved steel window frames.

As for the other buildings, Ross enlisted a further gaggle of big names. Norman Foster is doing 50 Hudson Yards, still under construction. David Childs and Skidmore, Owings &amp; Merrill have designed 35 Hudson Yards, a handsome, 1,000-foot-high stack of shops, offices, a hotel and apartments, outfitted in limestone and glass.

Then there’s 15 Hudson Yards, sleek and cylindrical, with a shapely, rounded top, an apartment tower with separate entrances for the wealthy condo owners and the subsidized renters, into which the low, long Shed improbably nests.

The combo of tower and Shed can bring to mind a Victorian matron wearing a bustle. The architects: Diller Scofidio + Renfro and the Rockwell Group.

Which leaves the StairMaster-like Vessel, whose designer is the English billionaire-whisperer, Thomas Heatherwick.

Architecturally, details deserve shout-outs, like the curved steel window frames at 55 and the V-shaped limestone crotch where the Shed intersects the tower. I like how the angled limestone slabs decorating 35 make the facade seem to shift between stone and glass as one passes the building; how the podiums of 55 and 35 play off each other, and how the chamfered base of 10 cedes the stage to a spur of the High Line, making the skyscraper suddenly appear to step back on tiptoe.

But details are details. Overall, Hudson Yards epitomizes a skin-deep view of architecture as luxury branding. Each building exists to act like a logo for itself. The assortment suggests so many crowded perfume bottles vying for attention in a department store window display.

Which was the point, I gather. Although Ross owns the Miami Dolphins football franchise, and so presumably knows that all-star games tend to be duds and teamwork wins championships, Hudson Yards derives from a conviction that high-end tenants demand distinct, name-brand buildings.

When we met the other day, the developer reeled off the architects for those western yards. They include Frank Gehry, Herzog and de Meuron, Santiago Calatrava and Robert A.M. Stern.

“Do you imagine this as a museum of architecture?” I half-joked.

“Yes, that’s exactly what we’re doing,” he replied. “We are creating a museum of architecture and a whole new way of life,” he added. “This is New York as it should be, with everything you want at your doorstep.”

I wondered who would want to live in an architectural petting zoo. And whom he meant by you.

The obvious precedent here is Rockefeller Center, completed during the 1930s, the last comparable development in midtown Manhattan. According to Daniel Okrent, who wrote the definitive history, Rockefeller Center entailed “not a scintilla of public land, public money, or public oversight.” It employed a variety of architects. But one of them, Raymond Hood, was very much in charge.

What resulted is an object lesson in urban design and a landmark of modern art and architecture, a development ingeniously, democratically woven into the fabric of the street grid. At a glance, Rockefeller Center looks unified because of all the masonry construction and art deco details. But the real source of its coherence is its plan.

From his earliest sketches, Hood made the center’s choreography of massing — the dramatic sequencing of low-, medium- and high-rise buildings — the bedrock of that plan. All the parts work in harmony to create a singular place inseparable from the rest of the city. Think of the famous landscaped passage from Fifth Avenue down to the skating rink, which frames the view of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, the tallest building, around which the entire project revolves.

Hood grasped the difference between scale and size — how a site with multiple entrances needs to be orchestrated from many angles, how architecture without urban design is just sculpture, how true art enhances the dignity of a place, and how the success of a neighborhood and its retail businesses come down to what’s happening at street level.

Hudson Yards barely acknowledges any of these things.

During the 1950s and early ‘60s, residents of Greenwich Village, the neighborhood where I grew up, grumbled about the destruction of tenements and other old buildings south of Washington Square Park to make way for superblocks and apartment towers called Washington Square Village and University Village.

To older Villagers, like my parents and my aunt and uncle, the big blocks and towers looked oppressive and monolithic, defying the scale, character and diversity of the area.

But by the time I was a boy, the superblocks and towers were facts of life, where my friends lived and I enjoyed riding the elevator to the top floors to get bird’s eye views of my home a few blocks away. The neighborhood gradually accommodated. The towers (by James Ingo Freed at I.M. Pei &amp; Associates, with a public sculpture based on a work by Picasso) are now justly landmarked.

Healthy cities are adaptive organisms. If New Yorkers take to the Shed and eat at the mall, Hudson Yards may come to seem less like some gated community in Singapore. Much will depend on Thomas Woltz, from the landscape architecture firm Nelson Byrd Woltz, whose task is to counteract all the glass, steel, shade, concrete, gigantism and randomness.

He is in charge of open space. Woltz is planting trees and shade-tolerant shrubs and perennials. He has conceived a huge Spirograph of elliptical planters, made of hand-chiseled granite blocks, which circumnavigate Heatherwick’s Vessel.

Like the Nazca Lines in Peru, the ellipses can’t really be read except from above, but on the ground their curves — like everything at the yards, expensively crafted — are devised to play off all the hard edges and provide seating. Bald cypress and black gum trees should add a horticultural canopy that gestures toward human scale.

Up in the sky, Hudson Yards’ observation deck may also become an attraction — a triangular platform, 1,100 feet high, theatrically cantilevered from the top of 30, with bleachers that provide an even loftier view. It opens next year.

I got a preview the other day. It’s one of the most amazing vistas over the city. I gazed north toward Harlem, gaped at the Empire State Building, and took in lower Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty. New York is awesome, I thought.

Then it occurred to me. From that deck, you can’t see Hudson Yards.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/arts/hudson-yards-is-manhattans-mbiggest-newest-slickest-gated-communityis-this-the-neighborhoodnew-york-deserves.html" id="2d3b49d9-eae1-3a1b-af54-0960a7ab5d7b">The New York Times</a>.

Hudson Yards Is Manhattan's Biggest, Newest, Slickest Gated Community. Is This the Neighborhood New York Deserves?

NEW YORK — You can see it on the skyline or along the Hudson River, upending Manhattan’s silhouette. It has materialized almost like a mirage, levitating above gritty acres of working rail tracks on the Far West Side.

NEW YORK — There was a time when New York City had the gateway it deserved.

Demolished more than half a century ago, the former Pennsylvania Station by McKim, Mead &amp; White was hardly the first great building in town to face the wrecking ball. The Lenox Library by Richard Morris Hunt and the old Waldorf-Astoria by Henry Hardenbergh on Fifth Avenue also came down. For generations, New Yorkers embraced the mantra of change, assuming that what replaced a beloved building would probably be as good or better.

The Frick mansion, by Carrère and Hastings, replaced the Lenox Library. The Empire State Building replaced the old Waldorf.

Then, a lot of bad architecture, amid other signs of postwar decline, flipped the optimistic narrative.

When Penn Station became during the mid-1960s a subterranean rat’s maze, the city seemed to be heading very definitely south. The historic preservation movement, which rose from the vandalized station’s ashes, was born of a new pessimism.

People today forget that the original station’s construction, shortly after the turn of the last century, caused its own tumult. Several midtown blocks needed to be leveled, which meant displacing thousands of residents from the largely African American community in what was once known as the Tenderloin district in Manhattan. The emptied lot, awaiting McKim’s masterpiece, now looks almost comically vast in photographs.

The building that opened in 1910 — its concourse longer than the nave of St. Peter’s in Rome, its creamy travertine quarried, like the ancient Colosseum’s, from Tivoli, its ceiling 138 feet high, its grand staircase nearly as wide as a basketball court — was a “beautiful beaux arts fortress,” as architect Vishaan Chakrabarti has put it.

Grand Central Terminal, at Park Avenue, by Warren and Wetmore, created a bustling new urban hub intricately woven into the fabric of the surrounding streets. By contrast, Penn Station had its fancy portes cochères for the railroad’s well-heeled customers, and 84 huge, somber Doric columns, with 22 roosting eagles guarding the entrances.

Inside and out, the building was meant to be uplifting and monumental — like the Parthenon on steroids — its train shed and waiting room a skylit symphony of almost overwhelming civic nobility, announcing the entrance to a modern metropolis.

With its swarming crowds and dust motes dancing in shafts of smoky light, the station was catnip to midcentury photographers, filmmakers, artists and architects. It was the architectural embodiment of New York’s vaulted ambition and open arms.

Alas, by the Depression, the building had already begun to decline, and by the mid-1950s, the Pennsylvania Railroad was bleeding money — a victim of cars, planes and general urban decline. Interstate highways and commercial air travel, buoyed by lavish government subsidies, were taking a toll on train ridership. Once bright and gleaming outside, the station, which cost a fortune to maintain, was increasingly grimy, like the streets around it. Shops were shuttering where businessmen who missed the 5:45 to Morristown used to pick up chocolates for their wives.

On top of which, as Ada Louise Huxtable, the former New York Times architecture critic, wrote in 1966: “Functionally, the station was considerably less than noble. The complexity and ambiguity of its train levels and entrances and exits were a constant frustration.” Except for its glass-and-iron waiting room, she added, the station “was a better expression of ancient Rome than of 20th-century America.”

So it wasn’t altogether shocking when railroad executives offered the air rights for the property for $50 million (nearly 10 times that amount in today’s dollars). New York could downsize its station, stick it underground, add a sports arena and office tower on top and reboot itself for the rest of the century. To pragmatists, that sounded like progress.

In retrospect, entombed beneath Madison Square Garden and a commercial building too mediocre to rise even to the level of good or bad, the new Penn Station represented a city disdainful of its gloried architectural past.

Replacing the old station involved an engineering feat: sliding a gigantic steel deck over the working tracks and platforms so the station could still function even while the drum-shaped Garden rose above it.

Surreal photographs show crowds in the old waiting room seemingly oblivious to the wrecking crews dismembering the station around them. Moody black-and-white images of a half-demolished train shed bring to mind scenes of London during the Blitz or the crumbling ruins of ancient Babylon.

The sculpted eagles lowered by cranes from atop the giant columns look like flags at half-mast. Older salarymen with their hats on and younger ones without hats passed beneath banners hung from the columns promising a new era. A sign in one of the station’s underground hallways read, “Close It We Must To Build Your New Station.”

Conceived to handle fewer than 200,000 passengers, the replacement Penn Station is today the busiest transit hub in the Western Hemisphere, through which more than 600,000 commuters pass each day — an experience as humiliating and bewildering as Grand Central remains inspiring and exalted.

Plans by Albany to paint lipstick on the pig, widening some corridors and extending the station into the old McKim-designed Post Office across Eighth Avenue are only reminders of what was lost.

New Yorkers deserve a better gateway. Half a century later, the city is still waiting.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/nyregion/old-penn-station-pictures-new-york.html" id="dad47222-904c-3516-a463-8557bd0b8f22">The New York Times</a>.

When the Old Penn Station Was Demolished, New York Lost Its Faith

(Past Tense)

LONDON — Is there a better way to do public housing?

That’s the $32 billion question facing the federal monitor appointed to oversee New York City’s dysfunctional Housing Authority, fresh from its recent lead paint debacle. Estimates say the still-rising costs for repairs to all NYCHA properties are now approaching the annual gross domestic product of Bahrain.

Few cities in the world face housing problems as big as New York’s. That said, New York might learn a thing or two from the East London borough of Hackney.

Hackney has been upgrading its public housing projects — or council housing estates, as the British call them. The approach entails a combination of new construction along with renovating some existing buildings, everything underwritten by the addition of market-rate apartments.

Leveraging market-rate construction on public housing sites isn’t a new idea, of course. It has provoked occasional storms of protest in the United States.

It matters here that the council itself, not some private developer, is in charge. The council represents the residents already living on the estates, who are its constituents and have the most reason to fear displacement.

It also matters that Hackney has a young, design-conscious mayor, Philip Glanville. He and his district colleagues have enlisted a London firm, Karakusevic Carson Architects, known for working closely, and well, with council residents. Its goal: producing homes that these tenants desire, in newly mixed-income neighborhoods where everyone reaps the benefits.

I visited a couple of estates in Hackney — one named Colville, the other, Kings Crescent — both in the midst of transformation. It will be some time before they’re finished, but the results so far look good. They’re in different parts of the district. Colville Estate, from the 1950s, is in an area of Hackney that has been changing. The estate is wedged between a canal that has become home to a variety of upscale restaurants and fashion studios, and a park that remains surrounded by council housing estates.

Where Colville abuts the park, two new apartment towers replace a parking lot and a smaller, dilapidated estate housing block that was demolished some years ago. Austere and vaguely Brutalist, at 16 and 20 stories the new towers are clad in handmade water-struck Belgian bricks, one tower red, the other a smoky gray (the darker color a result of firing the same bricks another time).

The towers, for which Karakusevic Carson partnered with the distinguished London-based firm David Chipperfield Architects, have their own name, Hoxton Press.

Hoxton Press is an all-market-rate development. The old Colville consisted of some 430 subsidized apartments in aging, inward-turning housing blocks on narrow streets. All those old buildings are coming down. Those 430-odd apartments are being replaced by 925 new apartments, in phases, in the coming years. The new apartments built so far occupy a midrise complex of mixed-income, redbrick buildings around a network of playful, richly detailed open spaces. Hoxton Press, which acts as a signpost and gateway to the new Colville Estate, is the only all-market-rate part of the project.

All in all, the Colville makeover produces more subsidized units than before, including apartments for middle-income tenants. The estate will become roughly half market-rate, half subsidized. Construction is being done in phases to prevent displacement. Every resident of the old Colville who chose to remain on the estate has been guaranteed a new, better home.

A similar makeover by Karakusevic Carson, working with HHBR Architects, is refashioning Kings Crescent Estate, from the 1970s, in a different part of Hackney. There, changes involve renovations to older, existing buildings as well as the construction of sleek new midrise gray-brick apartment blocks that fill in stretches of long-vacant land where poorly maintained council towers were demolished in the early 2000s.

More than 100 older apartments are now fitted out with features residents requested, like winter gardens and balconies. Another 170 will be refurbished soon and 200 more apartments built. New and old buildings have been seamlessly integrated. Together they define new courtyard blocks along a grid of streets and open spaces that weave Kings Crescent into the surrounding neighborhood.

Subsidized and market-rate tenants at Kings Crescent share entrances, floors, apartment layouts and open spaces. There are no “poor doors” to distinguish entrances for different incomes. Subsidized tenants bought into the scheme because it delivered obvious benefits. Market-rate residents bought into it because it gave them first-rate apartments in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. Materials are high quality, units light-filled, the brick architecture substantial, dignified, well proportioned, simple and modern.

How did Hackney pull all this off?

Back in the 1980s, under Margaret Thatcher, the British government (like Ronald Reagan’s administration in the United States) wanted to get out of public housing. It offered council housing tenants an opportunity to buy their apartments, and turned management of estate properties over to independent housing associations.

In retrospect, the offer of ownership seems a fairly progressive idea. But it ended up reducing the number of subsidized units at the same time council housing services were declining and units weren’t being built by the government to replace the ones being bought out.

London’s public housing stock inevitably declined and shrank.

Skip ahead to 2007. Gordon Brown’s Labour Party came to power. A new regulation was passed. Now district councils, on their own, were permitted to borrow large enough sums to build or renovate council projects without having to partner with private developers, as had been the case before. The global market collapse obscured the rule’s effect for a while. But Hackney and other local districts saw its implications.

In 2010, the Hackney Council enlisted Karakusevic Carson. Hackney was then one of the few London districts that had not, over the years, jettisoned its staff of in-house urban planners. Architects and council leaders in conversation with residents began to imagine upgrading various underserved sites. The accelerating gentrification of East London meant rising land values in Hackney. Those land values underpinned the loans that would help pay for improvements.

In its waning months, the Bloomberg administration in New York floated a proposal to erect market-rate towers on select NYCHA properties, as a way of bridging the authority’s fiscal gaps. Residents went ballistic. But the approach was entirely unlike Hackney’s. There was next to no community engagement or serious planning or specific promises upfront about what benefits tenants would reap. The developers would be private.

Here in Hackney the process hasn’t made everyone happy, but the majority of tenants got what they wanted: new or renovated apartments, homes with gardens and terraces, buildings that felt solid and were made of brick, not concrete or glass. They wanted to remain together, as communities.

And they wanted to live in low- and midrise blocks, between three and 12 stories, not skyscrapers. Towers, for poor tenants, conjured failed public housing projects of the 1960s and ‘70s. For wealthy residents, towers provide lofty views from which to look down on neighbors. Navigating the conflicting semiotics, Hoxton Press, at Colville, with its involvement by Chipperfield, wears its luxury lightly.

Its exceptionalism is expressed in subtle ways, via the eloquent craft of the brickwork, the depth of windowsills, the quality of light in apartments and geometric arrangement of wraparound balconies that turn the buildings’ envelopes into stacked bands, like thick, hexagon-shaped pancakes, poised above elegantly vaulted lobbies sheathed in clear glass.

Those hexagons were conceived to be good neighbors — letting sunlight more easily reach the adjacent midrise buildings on the estate. Hoxton Press also shares with the rest of Colville a material language and open space. Cobbled granite floors run from inside the tower lobbies across a sculpted plaza to the midrise buildings. Some of the subsidized apartments I saw in those midrise buildings were bigger and hardly less luxurious than the ones I toured in Hoxton Press.

Two first-rate London landscape firms, Muf and Vogt, handled the intricate design of the courts, gardens, paths and other public areas at both Colville and Kings Crescent. Glanville and his colleagues on the Hackney Council deserve credit here. They proceeded from a bedrock belief that good design and humane urban planning are basic rights, not privileges for the rich.

New York doesn’t do urban planning. Its political leadership doesn’t seem to care much about design or its social impact. The gamble at Colville and Kings Crescent is that, step by step, engaged architects and a local government, jointly working on behalf of vulnerable residents, can turn public housing around and manage gentrification.

We’ll see how these mixed-income communities in Hackney evolve. But so far, that gamble is producing some of the most promising public housing I’ve seen in a while.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/01/arts/design/hackney-london-public-housing.html" id="5b602f65-ae6f-3a5d-a390-2f0ca65d0c7a">The New York Times</a>.

Michael Kimmelman

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