Take the seven train to Hudson Yards. After ascending a seemingly endless escalator and re-entering on street level, I guarantee you that you will see the Vessel. You’re in a rush and running late to orchestral rehearsal? You’re caught in an audiobook’s climactic chapter, or distracted by a riveting conversation? No matter. If you have been to Hudson Yards, then you have seen the Vessel.
The Vessel is a 150-foot-tall metallic structure that involuntarily attracts the eye of any passerby. It is viscous and visceral. Geometric and eclectic. From one angle it appears to be a tower of staggered ridges; from another, it has an interlacing criss-cross pattern. It is a vivid copper color, except when a passing cloud softens it to warm honey, or a nearby building’s shadow darkens it to amber, or the setting sun brightens it with hues of pink and yellow.
On the ground, concrete tiles encircle the Vessel, pointing inwards and guiding the steps of approaching visitors. Cameras tilt their lenses up. Selfie sticks extend out. The structure sucks every nearby being into its orbit. But even after admiring the view and posing for photos and forever memorializing the moment on social media, many people still aren’t sure what they are looking at. What is the Vessel, really?
Greg and Kim, a couple visiting from Long Island, craned their necks up and considered the structure. “I guess we’re at a loss for words,” Greg joked after a few seconds. They had just climbed to the very top and back again, passing some time before attending a Rangers game later that day. “It’s beautiful, it’s awe-inspiring.”
Kim adjusted her red and blue hair ribbons, which matched her shirt and Greg’s woolen Rangers hat. “It reminds me of a honeycomb, and we’re all inside it like bees,” she said.
Adam, a local resident visiting the Vessel for his second time, shared a similar reflection. “I like to think it’s a beehive. New York City is always buzzing, it’s got a bunch of buzzy people, so it’s a beehive for the busy people of New York.”
Behind him, the Vessel’s lattice framework appeared reminiscent of honeycomb, and the people scuttling between its upper levels seemed no larger than insects. Surrounding the Vessel were newly-constructed office buildings and a high-end shopping mall, each also divided and compartmentalized, each also full of men and women hurrying back and forth.
Maybe the Vessel reflects the corporate lifestyle ingrained in New York City–the shiny outside allure of success, the systematic bureaucracy within. Maybe the circular web of steps and landings embody the endless cycle of work expounded by Nietzche, Camus, and philosophers across the eras. But for such a timeless message, the Vessel is quite young. It first opened in 2019, and all of the surrounding buildings are even more recent.
Before the Vessel and the skyscrapers and the endless tourists, there were rail yards and mills and warehouses. The year was 2003, and New York City had submitted its bid to host the 2012 Olympics. Their plan hinged on the development of far west midtown. The area roughly spanned from the Hudson River to 10th Avenue and from 30th Street to 35th Street. A large portion of this was the West Side Yard, a 26-acre and 30-track storage yard for Long Island Rail Road trains.
City officials envisioned constructing a giant stadium above the tracks. It would serve as a soccer stadium, as well as a venue for the Olympics’ opening and closing ceremonies. Although New York lost the bid to London, this process reopened conversations and imaginations about one of Manhattan’s last major undeveloped neighborhoods.
In 2005, Mayor Bloomberg, the New York City Council, and the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) began making official arrangements to rezone the district and build platforms covering the West Side Yard. A few years later, the real estate firms Related Companies and Oxford Properties Group bought the development rights and initially invested over $400 million into the project.
Construction started in 2012. The neighborhood soon transformed with the creation of hotels, office buildings, and residential buildings easily surpassing fifty stories. Seven years and $25 billion later, what had once been a flat, open train yard was a sharp and shiny skyline.
Now called Hudson Yards, the neighborhood marketed itself as “a future that will redefine Manhattan.” New Yorkers responded with mixed support. On the one hand, the development offered over 4,000 new apartments and created over 55,000 jobs. It expanded office availability, attracting major companies such as WarnerMedia, CNN, and Wells Fargo. The neighborhood also served as a major transit hub. The name “Hudson Yards” alludes to the West Side Yard, which continues to fully function beneath the skyscrapers’ blueprints and tourists’ footprints.
Others criticized the project as profit-driven and elitist. The extravagant and expensive housing catered towards the top 0.1%, the public green space seemed like an afterthought, and the urban planning appeared forced and rushed. And in the middle of this all, meant to be the defining centerpiece of a sleek and modern city plaza, was the Vessel.
Reviews compared the Vessel to both the Eiffel Tower and a waste-basket, highlighting the public’s divided opinion over the structure itself and the development that came with it. The Vessel matched the area’s modern atmosphere but felt out of place among the towering highrises. It was irresistibly unavoidable yet also random, a little awkward, and conceptually confusing. What is the Vessel, really?
Natalie and her daughter Isabella travelled from Texas to sightsee in New York. They had been intrigued by pictures of the Vessel on Instagram and wanted to check it out for themselves. While there, Natalie pondered the structure’s meaning.
“I think it’s a journey,” she decided, a hint of a Southern accent flavoring her speech. She looked out at the surrounding landscape, which has evolved dramatically in just the past decade.
Roman and Victoria were also visiting the Vessel with their daughter, traveling from Washington, D.C. to celebrate her seventh birthday. Roman described the structure as “overwhelming.”
“It’s like a funnel, it’s like something that draws people in,” he reflected. His daughter spun in circles nearby, entertaining herself by playing in the Vessel’s shadow.
“Maybe it’s like the heart of the city,” added Victoria. “We have a main vessel in our body, so I think that’s probably the idea of it.”
The largest blood vessel in the human body is the aorta. It’s over a foot long and transports blood rich with oxygen out from the heart. The aorta is an essential hub of activity, connecting all parts of the body just as the Vessel brings together visitors from across the country and world. Perhaps this is the Vessel’s purpose–a symbol of collaboration and unity during increasingly divisive times.
Creating the Vessel was a global endeavor. It was designed by the British architecture company Heatherwick Studio, then constructed in Venice, Italy, and finally pieced together in New York. Heatherwick Studio claims that the inspiration for the structure came from ancient India.
Thousands of miles away and hundreds of years in the past, stepwells were an important part of everyday life in regions of the Indian subcontinent. These extended several stories deep to the water table. Surrounding the perimeter were interlocking flights of stairs comparable to the Vessel’s structural design.
Stepwells were a place to get clean water, a stop for travelers to rest along trade routes, and a public space for many members of society. The Vessel, too, has been a communal, cross-cultural gathering place since its opening. Whether it was for a historical connection or the Instagram-ready backdrop, droves of tourists quickly flocked to see the Vessel upon its unveiling.
Throughout its first few weeks, the Vessel welcomed over 120,000 visitors, and tickets were booked solid up to two weeks in advance. About 2 million people visited the structure during its first year. Then, in 2020, the pandemic plummeted tourism rates and threatened the initial success of Hudson Yards.
The Vessel had once been a hive of life, but it grew empty and hollow as people quarantined at home. In January of 2021, after three young adults took their lives by jumping off the top, the Vessel closed indefinitely.
How did a structure meant to foster community so quickly become a place of death and isolation? Did COVID-19 germs coat its metal railings, did the gold-rimmed panels flash red and blue with the passing of each ambulance? If the Vessel is the heart of the city, then New York must have struggled to stay alive during those long pandemic months. Wind whistled through the silent stairwells; rain rinsed the open floor.
The Vessel has closed and reopened a few times since then. In October of 2024, the structure most recently reopened with the addition of several safety precautions, including wire netting surrounding the upper levels and a requirement that minors must be accompanied by an adult. Although the netting might ruin an idyllic selfie background, it has so far been successful in preventing further suicides.
The Vessel now again receives an influx of visitors from around the globe. Adults in tie-dye hoodies and Northface jackets and thick fur coats walk around its perimeter, teens with mini backpacks and giant duffels and bright red target bags pose for pictures, and kids wearing ripped jeans and sweatpants and patterned leggings lounge on nearby benches. A couple twirls and dances together across the Vessel’s shadow.
It is an orbit, a cyclone of fashion trends and cultures spinning around one single monument. The plaza fills with a dozen overlapping languages, but even an international vocabulary cannot entirely articulate the structure’s powerful gravitational pull. What is the Vessel, really?
Destiny was gazing back at the Vessel, having spent the last several minutes exploring its interior. They waved energetically at three other people straggling out of the structure’s exit. “Family! Come over here, we’re being interviewed!”
Destiny is an energetic individual with blond, short-cropped hair. They are a New York City resident, but visited the Vessel for the first time with some family members from Cleveland, Ohio.
“It makes me think of animal cells, the way it’s shaped,” Destiny reflected. Another family member offered a different biological comparison: “It’s like a pinecone, full of seeds.”
Destiny’s mother, Laurie, agreed and added yet another insight. “When I look at it, when I hear the name of it, it makes me feel like it represents all of humanity… coming together in a single place,” Laurie pondered.
On the opposite side of the structure was a different group of tourists. Veronica and her daughter Joaquina had journeyed from Buenos Aires, Argentina, and were now standing at the foot of the Vessel. Joaquina wore a bright floral patterned coat paired with a Gryffindor scarf, the red and golden stripes distantly reflecting in the Vessel’s shiny walls.
“It’s surrealist. It’s unbelievable,” Veronica promptly described. Then she paused, considering. “I’m confused. I don’t understand, is it supposed to be up-down or down-up?” Above her, visitors were walking up and down, down and up, up and down the endless staircases. It felt mesmerizing, almost, to watch people wander with no direction, to see them peek down over the edge at people in the plaza like me.
I took the 7 train to Hudson Yards. I ascended the never-ending escalator, and when I stepped out onto street level, I immediately saw the Vessel a little ways away.
From the outside, the Vessel has the grandeur of the Eiffel Tower and the vague shape of a waste-basket. On the inside, it has 80 landings, 154 interlocking flights of stairs, and over 2,500 individual steps. But when I approached the structure, I was less concerned with architectural details and more intrigued by how the Vessel interacts with the surrounding people and space.
The Vessel has no boundaries. It exists in multiple dimensions, reflecting in the windows of nearby cars and buildings. It multiplies inexplicably and inescapably–now to my left in a taxi’s side-view mirror, now under my shoes in a puddle. It surrounded me before I even entered.
Walking around the perimeter, I watched my own reflections stretch across the Vessel’s mirrored walls. The structure absorbed and reinvented me. Body parts splintered and merged between panels, and the sidewalk appeared to crack, twist, and shrink as I turned the corner. When I stepped inside the Vessel’s base, I looked up and saw tiny replicas of myself smudged, like thumbprints, on each shiny beam.
The Vessel is the centerpiece of Hudson Yards, a symbol for the neighborhood’s recent transformation. But while the Vessel represents the completion of the Hudson Yards development, it also serves as a continuation of the innovation and imagination first evident in the project’s initial planning. Grounded on land that has rapidly evolved from industry to luxury, the Vessel actively continues to reimagine its surrounding environment through dizzying reflections and perspectives.
I continued to explore the structure. I crisscrossed staircases that felt like a labyrinth and admired reflections that seemed like a fever dream. Standing on the highest platform, I looked down at all the levels below me and the tiny people hurrying across the street. The Vessel made me feel huge. Then I looked up at the towering skyscrapers, stretching upwards until they faded into a hazy blue sky. The Vessel made me feel miniscule.
A lazy breeze drifted by, and I rested my hands against the metal railings. Although the structure was crowded with tourists, the moment felt peaceful, and I found myself pondering the question that had echoed across the minds of countless visitors from across the world.
What is the Vessel, really?
To me, the Vessel is an incarnation of infinity. Infinity is a concept that humans will never fully grasp but attempt to comprehend through art, stories, and equations. The Vessel’s interlocking maze of steps reminds me of the gravity-defiant staircases in M.C. Escher’s Relativity. Its seemingly infinite landings are like the immeasurable rooms in the Grand Hotel Paradox. Its lattice framework emulates an indefinitely repeating cosine graph.
From above, I could see all the levels converging downwards towards a single point, the structure itself becoming a visual representation of a mathematical infinite series. Calculus allows for the addition of infinite terms approaching a single finite sum. The Vessel, similarly, is the summation of an infinite number of people and perspectives, contained within a finite 50 square-foot base.
There is no one explanation of the Vessel because the reflections in its walls and the people in its staircases are constantly changing. Whether it’s a nod to ancient Indian culture or a parallel to patterns found in nature, an emulation of abstract philosophies or a mathematical analogy, the Vessel has countless possible interpretations for each person who visits. All you need to do is take the 7 train.
Grounded on land that has rapidly evolved from industry to luxury, the Vessel actively continues to reimagine its surrounding environment through dizzying reflections and perspectives.