Saturday reflections

Reflections by Hudson Yards on the West Side, featuring The Vessel, the copper-clad public art in the center of the complex.

The Vessel opened in 2019 and there were long lines to climb it so I never bothered. The first suicide occurred less than a year after it opened. Then there was another. Then another. The Vessel was closed; you could look but you couldn't climb. It reopened briefly, there was another suicide, and now it's closed again, just taking up space in the middle of Manhattan.

I feel like I should be able to say something interesting or profound about that because I really have a visceral dislike of Hudson Yards, which has always seemed to me to try way too hard to be New York Cool without really understanding what that is, but it's Saturday night and I'm tired from teaching today, so profundity is way beyond my capabilities at the moment. But I love these reflections.