The Only Good Thing to Come Out of This Pandemic: The Befitting Failure of New York City's Hudson Yards
It's official: that gleaming monument to hubris known as Hudson Yards—the mega-development on the West Side that made Tenth Avenue unnavigable for years and ruined the Manhattan skyline with a bunch of ugly, dystopian towers, not to mention that rusting atrocity The Vessel—is a big fat $25 billion flop, as the Times reports. I'm sure similar, schadenfreude-stoked stories were written in the 1930s when the Empire State Building opened just in time for the Great Depression and sat half empty for years, but Hudson Yards is uniquely ill-timed, maybe even irredeemably cursed, as the pandemic has shuttered its marquee tenants (most notably Dallas import Neiman Marcus—as if the city didn't already have a surplus of homegrown retailers selling a bunch of overpriced stuff nobody can afford), while even that suicide-inviting, stairway-to-nowhere monstrosity that is its centerpiece has been mothballed. And the residents of the city are stuck with a hideous heap of hulking, deserted