The Vessel (2019), a glimmering monument at the centre of the Hudson Yards luxury real estate development on Manhattan’s west side that has been closed to the public since 2021, will reopen later this year. The New York Post, which first reported the reopening, did not specify a date.
The 150ft-tall outdoor installation designed by Thomas Heatherwick and his Heatherwick Studio features 154 flights of stairs arranged in an ascending honeycomb-like pattern and cost an estimated $200m to build. It was closed to the public in July 2021 after a 14-year-old boy visiting with his family jumped off the structure to his death. The Vessel had reopened to the public just two months earlier after closing in January 2021 following a string of three suicides over the previous year.
At the time of The Vessel’s brief reopening in mid-2021, no modifications were made to the structure to prevent people from jumping off it, but additional security agents were brought on and new rules had been put in place requiring visitors over the age of five to purchase $10 tickets (the popular attraction had previously been free for anyone) and every visitor was required to be accompanied by at least one other person.
Now, according to The New York Times, the structure will be outfitted with “floor-to-ceiling steel mesh” netting on multiple staircases, a spokesperson for Hudson Yards real estate developer Related Companies said. The structure’s two lowest levels will remain fully open, and its top level (at a height equivalent to the 16th storey of a building) will remain closed to the public.
Heatherwick, a divisive artist, designer and architect, is best-known for public projects that he and his studio have created including the Olympic cauldron from the 2012 summer games in London and the Little Island park off the coast of Manhattan’s Meatpacking District. Following The Vessel’s second closure in July 2021, a Heatherwick Studio employee told The New York Times that the firm had “designed safety barriers for The Vessel a while back” but the developer had been reluctant to build them.
From its opening in 2019, The Vessel was both an enormously popular tourist attraction and a widely reviled piece of public art—likened, alternately, to a “giant shawarma” and, by Heatherwick himself, to a giant rubbish bin. It became the object of further disdain when it was revealed that the attraction’s unusual photo policy gave Hudson Yards the right to use any photos taken near The Vessel for its own commercial purposes, without restrictions or royalty fees (the policy was subsequently revised).
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. You can also text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text line counselor. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org.
