Foreign Property News | Posted by Hnin Ei Khin
A towering sculpture called Vessel — made up of 2,500 twisting steps the public can climb — was to open Friday as the visual centerpiece of Hudson Yards, a $25 billion urban complex on Manhattan’s West Side that is the city’s most ambitious development since the rebuilding of the World Trade Center.
When fully complete, the 28-acre (11-hectare) site will include 16 towers of homes and offices, a hotel, a school, the highest outdoor observation deck in the Western Hemisphere, a performing arts center and a shopping mall, which also opened Friday.
About half the complex is complete, with the rest scheduled to be done by 2025.
The opening of the $200 million Vessel and the landscape around it will likely bring a wave of tourists to a rebuilt corner of the city that previously held a huge rail yard, parking lots and weedy sidewalks where prostitutes cruised.
The 3,200-ton structure was assembled from steel-and-concrete pieces manufactured in Monfalcone, Italy.
Accommodating 600 visitors at a time, it is 150 feet (46 meters) tall and rises from a narrow point at its base to a width of 150 feet at its peak.
“We needed to have a centerpiece, we needed to have an attraction, a destination — something where you would say, ‘I’ll meet you at,'” said Jay Cross, president of Related Hudson Yards, which partnered with the Oxford Properties Group to develop the site. “And we thought monumental art is the way to go.”
The concept was to make something “participatory,” he said of the sculpture, created by British designer Thomas Heatherwick.
“The idea was that everybody would just come in and climb it, be able to propose marriage up here, or run up and down — do whatever they want.”
Admission is free but people can get timed tickets in advance to avoid a line to enter.
The developers, including Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross, have billed their project as the most expensive private development in U.S. history.
High-power tenants planning to move into Hudson Yards office space include CNN, the luxury goods maker Coach, WarnerMedia and the BlackRock money manager.
About 60 percent of nearly 300 luxury apartments on the market have been sold, with hundreds more coming up.
The observation deck will open later this year on the 100th story of one of the city’s tallest buildings.
The wedge-shaped deck will be 100 feet (30 meters) above the one on the 86th floor of the Empire State Building, with a bird’s-eye view of the New York skyline and the Atlantic Ocean.
The arts center, a 200,000-square-foot (18,580-square-meter) building called The Shed, is scheduled to open April 5.
Ref: Property Report
