The Hudson Yards development in midtown Manhattan is being urged to dismantle the Vessel, its 150ft centrepiece building-cum-sculpture, after a fourth suicide.
Four people have jumped from it in less than two years, the latest being a 14-year-old boy on Thursday. The honeycomb-like staircase had reopened two months earlier, following three suicides since it first opened. Several measures had been taken to reduce the risk.
Heatherwick Studio, the design firm led by the Briton Thomas Heatherwick, which created the Vessel, said it was “distraught” and told the New York Times it had explored ideas to improve safety. Those ideas “required further rigorous tests”, it said, adding that it had yet to decide on what would be “feasible in terms of engineering and installation”.
This week, however, the Curbed website said: “It’s time to dismantle the Vessel.”
After the third suicide, Related Companies, the company that controls Hudson Yards, started charging a $10 entrance fee and added a new rule stating that visitors must not climb the structure alone.
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“That only made the horror worse, because the boy who jumped yesterday did so in front of his family,” Curbed noted this week.
The Vessel has enjoyed some popularity on Instagram but is becoming infamous for the suicides.
The first happened in February last year. The Vessel was then closed in January after two suicides within a month. It reopened in May but the operating company had not raised its chest-high barriers, despite requests from community leaders and researchers.
Lowell Kern, chairman of a local government body, told The New York Times: “I’m very sad. This was entirely preventable. The community board has advised Related that the only surefire way to prevent this from happening is to raise the height of the barriers on the Vessel. We are dealing with life-and-death issues. Art and architecture have to take a back seat.”
Stephen Ross, the Hudson Yards developer, told the Daily Beast website the structure might not reopen. A spokeswoman for Hudson Yards said that it was investigating.
