405. Monster among Monsters: The Shed

BROWDERBOOKS

Countdown:  As of 7:15 a.m. today, 1 week, 4 days, 1 hour, 45 minutes until the release of The Eye That Never Sleeps, at which point all pre-ordered books will be shipped. (Assuming the publisher starts shipping at 9 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.)  And the giveaway of 100 e-books is in full swing: when I last checked, 168 people had signed up.

 

A story of the strangest friendship that ever was: a dapper young bank thief and the detective hired by the banks to apprehend him.  For more about this and my other books, go here.  

Fascinating New Yorkers has been reviewed by The US Review of Books.  Reviewer Gabriella Tutino says, "There's something for everyone here in this collection of profiles, and it serves as a source of inspiration for readers who love NYC."  For the whole review, click on US Review.

SMALL TALK: My Five Essentials, things I cannot do without.

In no particular order:

1.  Bread
2.  Trees
3.  Books
4.  Sleep
5.  Hope

1. My mainstay in the morning.  Needn't be gluten-free, since I'm not allergic to gluten.

2.  Since childhood, when I climbed riverbank willows and stared in fascination at the giant cottonwood overlooking our house.  Would it ever topple and crush us?  But it rippled in the noon breeze, flashing spots of silver.

3.  I was a bookworm from an early age, and it cost me jeers and insults, and the nickname "Glasses."

4.  Even in the City That Never Sleeps, I've got to have my eight hours daily.

5.  The past is horrors, and the present, problematic; but tomorrow ... 

Do you have five things you absolutely cannot do without? What are they?

                              Monster among Monsters:

                            The Shed

         The New York Times is Shed-obsessed.  By “the Shed,” of course, I mean the Shed in Hudson Yards, the multi-million-dollar 28-acre real-estate development on the West Side of Manhattan between West 41^st and 30^th Streets.  Built on a platform covering a storage yard used by trains of the Long Island Rail Road, the site sends soaring glass and steel boxes skyward so they can house luxurious residential units and office space for the world’s ruling class.  By way of contrast, the low-rise Shed itself huddles among these heaven-scratching Titans, though "huddle” may suggest some squat architectural monstrosity, which hardly describes this hulking structure, a monster among monsters.  The huge bulk of it, to judge from photographs, rises above mere tourist mortals like a Mongolian yurt, or better still, a quilted sleeping bag for an outsized mammoth.  And if the sheer size of it says money, the towering glass and steel giants in its proximity fairly scream it.  Hudson Yards is all about money.  Big money for a big project in a city that celebrates BIG.

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Epicgenius

        I have yet to visit the site, but photographs and articles convey a lot.  I say the Times is Shed-obsessed because it can’t get enough of it.  The thing rated an article by Ginia Bellafante in the Metropolitan section of the Sunday Times of April 7, 2019, entitled “The Shed as Dispensation From Capital Sin,” with “Capital” used in the sense of – you guessed it – money.   And in the same issue of the Times, on the first page of the Real Estate section (which I rarely read), is C.J. Hughes’s article “Giants Within A City of Giants,” comparing Hudson Yards to another huge development, Battery Park City.  And in the Travel section, Sebastian Modak's article "New, Strange and Familiar, It's Still New York," recounts his attempt to walk the whole twelve-mile length of Manhattan in a single day (he got as far as Harlem).  En route, he took a look at Hudson Yards and the Vessel (a $200 million stairway to nowhere, mentioned below), and concluded that Hudson Yards is New York trying to be Dubai.

          And that's just the Times of April 7.  All this on top of Zachary Woolfe’s article, “A Shed Is Born,” starting on the front page of the Arts & Leisure section of the Sunday Times of March 31, 2019, whose inside pages also offered Michael Cooper’s article “Can the Shed Redeem Hudson Yards?”  Given the words “Dispensation,” “Capital Sin," and “Redeem,” one gathers that some gross offense has been committed, with the Shed as a possible gesture of redemption.  What gives?  The whole saga of Hudson Yards, it would seem.

         The best place to begin is Michael Cooper’s article, with the subtitle “How an arts center grew amid a Dubai-like development,” supplemented at times by details from that indispensable and infallible source, Wikipedia.

         It all began under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, when New York’s failure to get the Olympics left it with a rezoned district on the West Side and a rather vague plan to build some kind of cultural institution on a small parcel of city-owned land.  Brainstorming sessions with artists and others influential in the arts came up with the idea of a flexible project that would let artists, dancers, musicians, and theater people all work together.  So architectural firms were asked to design an undefined cultural entity that would be flexible.  They came up with an eye-catching feature, a sliding shell, and began referring to the structure as the Culture Shed.  In 2013 the mayor tossed in $75 million of city money and later added $75 million of his own.  It was all still undefined – a nice word for "vague" – and skeptics scoffed, while other biggies in the arts world, fighting to keep their own projects afloat in difficult times, seethed with jealousy. 

         In 2014 an artistic director was finally named: Alex Poots (rhyming with “snoots”), the British-born founder of the Manchester International Festival, who as artistic director of the Park Avenue Armory had made that venerable institution a hot new venue for must-see, cutting-edge art.  He declined the job at first, but then, having imposed certain conditions, accepted it and began making drastic changes:

·      The name was changed from “Culture Shed” to “Shed.”

·      Seating capacity was increased.

·      Better soundproofing was installed.

·      The building was reoriented, so that it faced east instead of north.

·      The Vessel, a shiny stairway to nowhere beloved of selfie-takers, was added to the north side.

·      A tower was added to the structure, its first ten floors providing back offices and storage spaces for the Shed.

The Plaza, with the Vessel, like a stack of pretzels, on the left.
 Epicgenius

         Clearly, Mr. Poots too is thinking BIG, and that means BIG money is needed.  So far, the Shed has raised $529 million, but it still needs more and will have to compete with rival cultural institutions for philanthropic support, a matter that its supporters are reluctant to discuss in detail.  And it needs to define itself.  Is it the northernmost part of the popular High Line, the elevated park built over a stretch of abandoned railroad tracks?  Or is it a part of Hudson Yards, that glossy, much-ballyhooed clutch of towers and condos that includes a seven-story mall where a haircut can cost $800?  Which brings us back to sin and redemption.

Greaper37

         Those soaring towers sprouted by the Hudson Yards are doing anything to stand out, to be different: some rise at an angle, some curve.  Why?  Because every corporate tenant wants to “have brand.”  And who are those tenants?  Coach, L’Oréal, Neiman Marcus, KKR, Warner Media, Wells Fargo Securities, and DNB, for a start.  And if some of these names are unfamiliar, it means that you’re not “on trend,” you aren’t “in the know,” your knowledge of the upscale, whether corporate or retail, is deficient.  (As mine is, by the way.)  If you google “Hudson Yards” on the Internet, you’ll be immersed in flashy images that pop your eyes from their sockets.  It’s all luxury apartments, fancy restaurants, gourmet groceries, glitz.  Hudson Yards welcomes the trendy and the moneyed.  Especially the latter, because without moolah you’ll feel out of place.  But money, as we all know from both tradition and experience, is dirty; $ = sin.  And that’s where the Shed, which has just opened to the public, comes in.  It appears like a knight in armor, a radiant redeemer, a haloed savior … it is hoped.

         Those towers twist and curve and soar; the Shed crouches.  Its appeal isn’t to the trendy – at least, not to the moneyed trendy, but to ordinary, selfie-prone visitors on a budget.  Tickets to events there are priced as low as $10, restaurants are reasonable, and the lobby is oriented not toward grandeur but utility.  And the theater offerings include “Art and Civil Disobedience” and a woman-centered celebration of radical art entitled “Powerplay,” both of them in conjunction with DIS OBEY, a program for high school students from underserved communities that focuses on social protest through poetry.  Like the multi-level structure itself, theater in the Shed is thumbing its nose at the rest of Hudson Yards and the elite who come there to shop or reside.

         So will this venture redeem Hudson Yards from capital sin?  It’s too soon to tell.  But there are complications and ambiguities.  The Ginia Bellafante article points out that one theater in the Shed is named for its benefactor, Kenneth C. Griffin, a hedge-fund manager.  Recently Mr. Griffin bought a penthouse on Central Park South for $238 million, the most ever paid for a residence in this country.  The Shed, Ginia Bellafante concludes, is like a generous birthday gift from the rich man who stole your wife.

         Meanwhile Hudson Yards, aglow with dazzle, is still being built.  The anticipated completion date: 2026.  Well, what's the hurry?  We can wait.