WEST SIDE GLORY
IT won’t replace “Mama Mia” or other shuttered Broadway shows, but anyone who cares about the city’s future could do a lot worse than drop by the fun-filled display of proposals for the MTA’s West Side railyards, on view at 335 Madison Ave. (entrance on 43rd Street at Vanderbilt Avenue).
There’s no music or dancing. Instead, there are five big, colorful models of the competing schemes for the 26-acre site bounded by 10th and 12th avenues and West 30th-33rd streets, along with explanatory graphics, blurbs, video clips and even live pitch-people.
Unfortunately, the charming dog-and-pony show – remarkably folksy for a land-use initiative that might well alter the future of Manhattan – is to fold its tent after next Monday. The MTA says it has no current plans to re-mount it elsewhere.
But it should rethink that at once. Even though the Hudson Yards showings are not part of a public review process, it’s unthinkable we won’t be able to see all the models together again.
The five visions are now scrunched into a flourescent-lit corner storefront. It’s so informal that the developers literally drew straws to determine which presentation would go where; Brookfield lucked out and drew the choice front, right-hand corner.
But the tight setup is ideal for seeing each proposal in relation to the others. You can get up close and personal with all of them. And unlike solemn Ground Zero master plans shown at various downtown venues, the Hudson Yards display has a holiday air about it.
Three of the designs come with built-in anchor tenants, which seem as eager to crow as the developers – Morgan Stanley at Tishman Speyer’s proposal; News Corp. (which owns The Post) with Related Cos./Goldman Sachs; and Condé Nast with the Durst Organization/Vornado. Brookfield Properties and Extell Development Co. are the dark horses in the field, with neither having yet recruited a prospective tenant.
The storefront presentations are so closely spaced, you can hear Condé Nast Chairman Si Newhouse (on film) saying he wants to make his media company’s home at the new site for “the next 100 years” even as you watch a video barrage of News Corp. products, including The Post and “The Simpsons.”
Developers’ reps pitch their proposals like vacation travel packages. “In the middle, we have what we’re calling the Spanish Steps of New York,” chirped Tishman Speyer’s rep.
“We can build a park over the tracks at the same time as we build the buildings on terra firma,” said a rep for Extell, which would construct a suspension bridge-like blanket over the yards instead of a platform.
Although not quite as besieged as the stuffed animals at FAO Schwarz, the models are swarmed daily by architects, planning wonks and just curious New Yorkers, like a firefighter who told one presenter that his model “looks like what New York is supposed to be.”
The cheery mood in the room is at odds with negativism among the blathering classes. The Times’ architectural sage has declared that all the proposals stink, and a baffling column in New York magazine found it a “comforting thought” that none of them, in the writer’s view, will ever get built.
Some deep thinkers evidently prefer to see the site remain forever in its current state – a wasteland of sunken railyards.
In the real world, the five proposals now on the table are as rational as they are necessary in a Manhattan where suitable open space for large-scale development is scarce.
Their broad brushstrokes are more alike than different, with office and residential buildings aligned along the yards’ northern and southern edges with lots of public space threaded between them in a variety of inventive ways.
But it’s entertaining to see how architects, including Kohn Pedersen Fox, Steven Holl, Helmut Jahn, Rafael Pelli and Skidmore Owings & Merrill put their creative spins on the MTA’s guidelines – which call for 12 million square feet of offices and apartments, plus oodles of open space, schools and stores.
To see how the proposals differ, you really need to see the models in close proximity. Web site images put up by the participating developers are confusing, misleading, and impossible to compare with those of rival bidders.
The MTA will select one bidder next March. Until then, the agency can surely find somewhere in its vast property holdings another space to showcase the designs as a group.
In fact, with so much riding on the outcome, it can’t afford not to.