Hudson Yards: Poster Child of Middle Class Destruction?
The reviews for the gleaming, ultra-posh New York development were bad. Police Academy 6 bad.
New York magazine's architecture critic, Justin Davidson, wrote that every time he approached Hudson Yards he felt "a volatile mix of wonder and dejection roil in my chest." He added, "I can't help feeling like an alien here.... I suppose this apotheosis of blank-slate affluence is someone's fantasy of the 21-century city, but it isn't mine."
Davidson wasn't alone.
Hudson Yards "is, at heart, a supersized suburban-style office park, with a shopping mall and a quasi-gated condo community targeted at the 0.1 percent," Michael Kimmelman of wrote of the 26-acre development on the West Side of Manhattan. "It gives physical form to a crisis of city leadership, asleep at the wheel through two administrations, and to a pernicious theory of civic welfare that presumes private development is New York's primary goal, the truest measure of urban
