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Hudson Yards, New York
Black lungs, headlights, heading out to the city tonight
At 1,100 feet above Tenth Avenue, Edge (not the Edge) at Hudson Yards is an outdoor observation deck that’s hard to miss on the skyline. It sits near the top of 30 Hudson Yards designed by Kohn Pederson Fox, and is the tallest of the Hudson Yards buildings.. From just about anywhere on the west side of Midtown Manhattan with an open view, it’s hard to miss that tall pointy tower with the pointy balcony stuck on it. When the Vessel, the mall and the public plaza at Hudson Yards all opened in March 2019, the Edge, um, I mean Edge wasn’t ready yet. From the nearby streets, from blocks away and from miles away it looked ready, but it wasn’t we were told. One day it would be ready, one day it would actually open and one day I would be there.
Ticket sales opened up in October 2019 and since I already decided that one day I would be there, I bought a ticket for opening day, March 11, 2020. After all, nothing really ever changes and there’s no reason not to make plans to stand around with lots of strangers months and months in advance. What could go wrong?
To start your Edge experience, you have to first get yourself to the Shops at Hudson Yards (or the Hudson Yards mall) and navigate the scattered escalators up to the fourth floor. From there, you go through a pretty quick security check- you walk through something that looks like a metal detector but you don’t have to take anything out of your pockets. Whether it works or not I can not say, but I can say it was a way better user experience than I am used to at a security check.
After security, you find yourself on a long, generous, circuitous path that teaches you facts about Hudson Yards in a generally well presented manner. Then at the end of this very nice and open experience, you find yourself trapped inside a small, tight room waiting to go up one of the two express elevators up to the 100th floor. The elevators use full height video monitors like the ones at One World Trade Center, a welcome distraction from an otherwise banal ride.
Once you get to the 100th floor, there are generous glass windows looking west but honestly, you came all this way to go outside on that balcony. Just find the door and we’ll meet you there.
The balcony is one of the great spaces in Manhattan, a large floating plaza with views so spectacular that it almost feels unreal enough to hide its fatal flaw. No matter what you do, you can’t hide the fact that Hudson Yards is really, really far away from the rest of Midtown.
That said, the observation deck itself remains awesome, fatal flaws be damned. Protective glass walls all project out and away from you, making it feel more open than you think. And that balcony feels really big when you first get there- a much larger space than it appears looking up from nearby streets, from blocks away and from miles away.
Another well designed piece of the observation deck is a series of outdoor bleacher seats that rise above the balcony and hug the tower. A great place to just stop and enjoy the experience, or to get a photo of everyone else who already stopped to enjoy the experience.
This picture also gives you a feeling for the breadth of the views from the balcony. One World Trace Center and the Empire State Building are both in the same wide angle shot, although that could be because they’re both so far away. One curious decision is that the balcony goes all in on the east and south views but ignores its connection to the rest of Hudson Yards. The Vessel is kind of visible, though distorted through glass, but the western yards (when finished) can really only be seen from the indoor glass by the elevator. And you’re too high to really enjoy the view of the High Line and most of the buildings surrounding it. It’s almost as if Hudson Yards knows that no matter what they end up doing, it will just never ever be as interesting as Midtown Manhattan.
The Edge balcony hovers over the very edge of the city and gives you a chance to look directly straight down through a glass floor and ask yourself, hey, is that Tenth Avenue down there?
On opening day, there was a line to take a picture of yourself at the pointy glass corner pointing east to Midtown and a big crowd on the glass floor. The view down is what you might expect, if you’ve ever spent time wondering what Tenth Avenue looked like from a thousand feet in the air.
The zoomed in views south and east don’t seem all that bad. Looking south you start with London Terrace on 14th Street, you can see some of the more prominent High Line buildings (the slanted one is by Bjarke Ingels) and then the river views open up to Lower Manhattan, Jersey City and all the way out to Staten Island. On the Midtown side, you have the New York Times building on the right and all of those super tall and super thin residential buildings on 57th Street that are changing the scale of the skyline. Looking at these pictures. its hard to understand comments about a fatal flaw and everything being so far, far away.
These two pictures are (basically) the same and taken with the wide angle lens. The Lower Manhattan view is somewhat blocked by towers at Hudson Yards, but its really the view you would expect zoomed out 20 blocks (or so). It’s the Midtown view that’s an issue. The massive ramp system of the Lincoln Tunnel is a wasteland in the city and hard to miss, like an open wound or an empty construction site that will never get built. And even the view to Moynihan Station (only a long block away) is blocked by the Manhattan West development, which likely has a better view of Midtown by being at least one precious, long block east of where you stand.
Edge opened up on March 11, 2019 at 1pm, I waited until around 3pm or so to head on up and stayed probably about an hour or an hour and a half. It remained opened the next day and closed after that- even on March 11, the writing was already on the wall and it was pretty obvious that things were going to change. Edge had multiple hand sanitizer stations everywhere and limited the number of people in the elevators, but we were still all way, way closer than six feet apart the whole time. On trains, on streets, on subways and in museums, the city was already starting to feel like a ghost town. Sure, it was damn nice to get a seat on a rush hour E train, but it was impossible not to think the whole time about where the hell everyone else went. Now, a month later, it’s almost impossible to think of anyone ever on a train or ever in a museum, and certainly impossible to think of anyone ever standing on that impossible, floating plaza, wondering why all the other buildings look so far away.
