The Vessel: a perfect symbol for the grifter capitalism of New York City's privatized Hudson Yards "neighborhood"

Hudson Yards is a notorious (and spectacularly badly timed) new "luxury housing development" in New York City: a massive, gated, privatized "neighborhood" in Manhattan, a city that has been literally hollowed out by runaway luxury real-estate speculation, to the exclusion of working people and mere millionaires alike.

Hudson Yards's capstone is a piece of monumental "public" architecture called "The Vessel" (also known by less flattering nicknames, like "the giant shawarma," "the beehive," "the pinecone," and "the wastebasket." The open-air structure is composed of staircases and landings that visitors can trudge up and down for the purpose of taking selfies. In true grifter capitalism style, the trudgers of the Vessel, agree, by passing under a series of threatening legal notices, that they are assigning a perpetual copyright license to the Vessel's corporate owners for any of those photos (this being an improvement on the original legal regime, in which visitors surrendered title to their copyrights, even to images taken later from distant places from which any part of the Vessel could be discerned). Oh, and you also "agree" to be recorded and to have the recordings retained indefinitely and used as the Vessel and its corporate managers see fit.

Enter Kate "McMansion Hell" Wagner (previously), the century's most acerbic and delightful critic of late-stage capitalism's architectural excesses. In a perfectly delightful column in The Baffler, Wagner lays out the case for The Vessel as a perfectly encapsulated symbol of all that is wrong with our economic moment and its intrusions into our built environments. Read the rest