“Live, Shop, Work & Dine in New York,” reads the tagline of Hudson Yards, a luxury neighborhood in the “Manhattan’s New West Side.” The HY advertises itself as a collective, a “cultural center” that’s “not only changed the way New York looks to the world, but the way the world sees New York.” HY’s website is a slick arrangement of text and images capturing a space whose seemingly choice-driven pathways are carefully curated to appear careless: well-groomed dogs advertise “paw play days” and well-groomed families are depicted in various states of shopping, eating and playing.
Hudson Yards is jarring for many reasons. First, the concept of HY as a community that can fully meet its occupants’ needs—negating self-care—troublingly conflates the working and the non-working self (Odell 17). In this space, work and commerce metastasizes into all facets of life with aesthetic slickness: who doesn’t want to optimize and perform all facets of themselves in one convenient location—especially if they can look so happy doing so?
In addition to leisure time being meticulously defined as consumer play, Hudson Yards also operates as a “faux public space,” where only one true pathway (masked as a mirage of pretty choices) can be followed (13): here, “you are either a consumer or a threat to the design of the place” (13). The material freedom inhabitants of HY enjoy is linked to an immaterial flow of capital. As such, the habitual nature of residents’ movements through HY masks how their behaviors aren’t sited in meaningful relationships with one another—nor are they embedded in terrestrial ecologies.
In fact, one living in Hudson Yards might begin to feel that they occupy a placeless space (a space that creates and regurgitates its own placeness, devoid of any semblance of sitedness in nature or even reality) that illuminates capitalism’s ultimate domination of the natural order. For total domination to mask itself as play, though, a careful management of attention and perception would be required. As such, it’s no surprise that HY claims to reshape the very way its residents can be perceived by—and perceive—the world. In other words, HY celebrates its ability to control how it sees the Other, and how it can be perceived by Others—commodifying a collective gaze that ultimately disembodies and thus dehumanizes both the perceiver and the perceived.
One of Hudson Yard’s main architectural features has been closed down in recent years due to a devastating string of suicides. Since opening in 2019, four individuals visiting “The Vessel,” a towering, hive-like structure, jumped to their deaths. I can’t ever know why these individuals chose to do so. But, as I take in HY’s brief history, I continue to be haunted by questions of non-things, disembodiment, and isolation. What happens when we no longer need to care for ourselves and others? What happens when we become so out of alignment with our bodies that we no longer feel like part of the terrestrial order? What do we do with our bodies when they’ve lost their capacity to relate—and are only able to connect, optimize, and choose to like or not like on a placeless plane? Might our bodies feel unnecessary; a thing whose very necessity is no longer in the realm of the living? (537)
[Han, 2022; Odell, 2019]