Earlier this month, a representative for Related Companies, the developer responsible for $60 billion worth of real estate including the glorified Manhattan shopping complex known as Hudson Yards, announced that it will reopen its Vessel after nearly three years of closure and four deaths by suicide. The 150-foot nest of interlocking copper-colored staircases will be equipped with floor-to-ceiling steel netting that will, the representative insists, preserve “the unique experience that has drawn millions of visitors from around the globe.” But after four suicides, an appalling disregard for human life by Related, and irresponsible design decisions by the structure’s designer Thomas Heatherwick, it’s time to shut down the Vessel for good.
Having spent a couple of years researching and reporting on suicide barriers, while mourning the loss of three people I’d personally known who died from jumping off of California’s Golden Gate Bridge, I am wary of any solution that promises to preserve the Vessel, however “unique” an experience it may be.
The netting approach might have been wise had it been taken four years ago, after the first death, or, better yet, eight years ago, when Audrey Wachs, an editor at the Architect’s Newspaper, took a look at the design proposal and immediately clocked the danger of the high drop and low railings. Wachs warned that the designer did not learn from the example of New York University’s Bobst Library, which installed plexiglass and metal fencing in 2012 to curb student suicide. Barriers like these and the ones proposed for the Vessel’s revamp can indeed prevent deaths. Research shows that safety nets reduce suicide attempts by 77.1% and vertical barriers, like the planned netting at the Vessel, by 68.7%, though people might still try a new method to jump off the site.
Barriers provide not only a physical buffer between a desperate individual and a deadly, impulsive act but also an existential one: They are a visual affirmation that someone cares if you live or die. Related Companies’ begrudging and belated implementation of this life-saving solution undermines its remarkable efficacy. The site is now inevitably triggering to those who may be contemplating suicide.
Time after time, the developer has failed to protect the safety of visitors at the Vessel. After the first suicide in 2020, a local community board wrote an open letter imploring Related to raise the railings. After each subsequent death, more joined the call for higher railings or added barriers. Related declined these well-researched suggestions. After the third suicide in 2021, it opted instead to ban solo entry, slap up signs with information about the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, increase security, and make visitors pay for it, charging $10 for entry. A message from Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation was printed on the back of the tickets: “Each of you matter to us, and to so many others.” Less than two months after reopening with these changes, a 14-year-old boy jumped to his death.
Though the Vessel is marketed as a work of public art — a pretense that was done away with entirely by the paid entry — it is better understood as retail bait. The honey-comb-shaped attraction is conspicuously located at the entrance to an otherwise out-of-the-way shopping mall, also owned by Related. The developers are undoubtedly aware that the specter of suicide, which will be made glaringly obvious by the presence of netting, might lure fewer visitors to its $200 million tourist trap, or at the very least, make those who do visit less primed to indulge in the nearby “shopportunities.” Related has evidently made the calculation that after three years of closure, unsettled tourists are still more lucrative than no tourists at all.
The cut-resistant floor-to-ceiling netting may prevent suffering individuals from leaping from the gleaming stairs, but it will not prevent them from hearing the message echoing through every fiber of the negligent construction and affirmed by every step of the developer’s conduct: that their vulnerability is a public nuisance, and that their deaths will go unacknowledged, if not unnoticed, by the world they leave behind. It will not prevent visitors from carrying that message with them to unguarded heights.
Architecture speaks back, and the only way that the Vessel can communicate anything that affirms the value of human life over aesthetics or profit is by doing so explicitly, not with a Lady Gaga promotional pamphlet or a grand reopening, but with a good-faith structural change: Weld shut the doors, erect a plaque, and stop trying to make a quick buck off a death trap.
It’s time to acknowledge the Vessel for what it has become: a memorial.
The Grand Duke of York
He had a thousand men
He marched them up the hill
And he marched them down again
……
A beautiful essay–unsentimental but elegiac in the best way. I abide Charley’s logic completely, but for the conclusion. All the failures of the artist and developer could now become a springboard for an ongoing life-affirming project: Keep the Vessel open, with fail-proof suicide prevention measures, but transform the experience into —
1) a lesson in the history of philosophical notions of death, the vaunted religious sanctity of life and the worth, in secular humanist terms, of the individual;
2) a workshop in the 20th-cent sociology of urban alienation and
3) a self-directed exercise in the contemporary psychology of self-awareness, sapience and volition.
This might sound didactic, but I think the time is right for a vernacular project confronting the darkest capacities of freedom in our time. The average citizen of the liberal democracies, which include North America, most of Europe and Latin America and a handful of nations in Asia and Africa, needs to understand the precariousness of life in our time, and feel empowered by the relative agency enjoyed in tolerant societies. That tolerance can paradoxically remove the distractions of fear and conformity that preoccupy the beleaguered citizens of Russia, China, Myanmar, Uganda, Iran, Syria, Burundi, Chechnya, North Korea, Kazakhstan, Turkey, the Congos, the Sudans, Venezuela, Malaysia and Belarus. The liberties of expression, association and pursuing the life–or Saturday afternoon–of one’s choice might seem mere luxuries to billions of people, such that jumping from a great height becomes, with stupendous ironic tragedy, a trivial concern.
The great East/West, North/South schisms of international conflicts and globalized culture and entertainment have assumed the spotlight of daily headlines; our priorities are ordered by the prevailing vacuum of a shared but unsteady ethos in the shadow of religion’s fall from power, and the consequent rise of tyranny as the answer to life in chaos, and the treacherous appeal of death as the click-bait to freedom from choice, the self check-out line to decision-free, eternal calm.
I’m lunging for the big picture of suicide here, but it’s not because I want a Disney World iteration of “Life is Worth Living.” No–over four decades, four of my friends, a cousin and a brother each took their own life. That doesn’t include several friends or acquaintances who took large doses of morphine at the apex of a terminal illness, intentionally pre-empting an end that was visited upon their lives. So my reaction to the failure and the possibilities of the Vessel is propelled by an intimate desire to invigorate the public discussion of suicide, and the impossible beauty, possibility and value of life. I think the Vessel could become an anti-suicide endeavor; if well-managed, it can be transformed from hazard to an Ark of a New Covenant, destination venerating life in all its complexity, a shrine that one approaches affirmatively and leaves intentionally, on two feet, with a larger mind, stronger heart and truer sense of self and belonging.