The Fate of the Hudson Yards
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The Hudson Yards represent Manhattan’s most tantalizing development site. Between 30th and 34th streets, and Tenth and Twelfth avenues, stretch former yards of the New York Central Rail Road, now used by the Long Island Railroad. The Bloomberg administration had hoped to build on this site a stadium for use in the 2012 Olympics and by the New York Jets football team. Vociferous community opposition to the plan, as well as opposition from Cablevision, owner of Madison Square Garden, which feared competition for concerts and events, doomed the proposal. But it has far from doomed dreams of massive development on a deck over the yards. Such decks cost exorbitant amounts of money, meaning that what’s built on the deck had better be pretty profitable — which is to say, big.
Many New Yorkers regard the area as unprepossessing, even desolate. The best spot from which to view the yards is Tenth Avenue at 32nd Street. The Hudson River Railroad established a depot and yards on this site in the 1850s.
When Abraham Lincoln’s funeral cortège passed up Broadway and Fifth Avenue from City Hall in April 1865, the depot here marked the destination. Later, Commodore Vanderbilt purchased the Hudson River Railroad, and absorbed it into his New York Central system. With Grand Central Terminal the hub of passenger operations, the West Side yards became freight-only. The High Line, which originates in these yards, replaced grade-level tracks of the New York Central that served factories and warehouses along the riverfront.
The postwar decline in New York’s port activities meant an end to freight operations in the yards. In the 1980s, the Javits Center rose on a portion of the yards. Although a striking design by I.M. Pei & Partners, the convention center lacks the space to lure the largest conventions, and has failed to spur development in surrounding streets. Partly that is due to the absence of nearby subway lines. The city administration believes that to attract development to the area a southward extension of the no. 7 train needs to be built.
Many people presume that the yards had something to do with Pennsylvania Station, but they didn’t, until their use by the L.I.R.R. The Pennsylvania’s tunnel from New Jersey, under the Hudson River, passed beneath the New York Central yards. To see the Penn’s tracks, you need only walk along 31st Street between Tenth and Ninth avenues. A gigantic concrete building, the Westyard Distribution Center, in 1970-vintage Brutalist style, occupies part of the block, built over the Penn’s open cut. Much of the cut, however, remains plainly visible.
Continue east on 31st street. Between Eighth and Ninth avenues stands the enormous General Post Office, or Farley Post Office, as it’s been known since it ceased to be the main post office. McKim, Mead & White designed the monumental classical edifice that rose between 1908 and 1913. Its style complemented Pennsylvania Station, on the other side of Eighth Avenue, demolished in 1963. The post office’s 20 53-foot-high Corinthian columns across its Eight Avenue front form the longest colonnade in the city. The building continues to function as a branch post office, and has attracted much interest for what might be built inside its voluminous spaces. For a long time we believed the building soon would welcome Moynihan Station, a new passenger facility to relieve in part the sinful ugliness of the 1968 Penn Station underneath Madison Square Garden. But the same Cablevision folks who helped scotch the stadium now want in on the post office, too, so that a new train station may share space with a new sporting arena. Stay tuned.
Meantime, not only does the post office boast our longest colonnade, but what must be our longest inscription: “Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” It comes from volume 4, book 8, line 98 of “The Histories” of Herodotus, from the Fifth century B.C.E., as translated by William Mitchell Kendall — the McKim, Mead & White partner who designed the building. Perhaps Kendall indulged a bit of license. The University of Chicago classicist David Grene translated the same line as, “And him neither snow nor rain nor heat nor night holds back for the accomplishment of the course that has been assigned to him, as quickly as he may.”
