When an icon fails, iconoclasm is the only reasonable response. Here, JDavidsonNYC writes on the Vessel
Take it down the way it went up. Photo: Gary Hershorn/Getty Images What’s a multibillionaire to do if his gift to the city becomes a suicide launch pad? Yesterday, a 14-year-old boy became the fourth person in two years to throw himself off the Vessel, the Hudson Yards sculpture that the man who ordered it, Stephen Ross, once compared to the Trevi Fountain and the Eiffel Tower.
Designed by the gifted fantasist Thomas Heatherwick, the steel folly has had a rough time adapting to reality. The basket of stairs was meant to be open for everyone to clamber over and around, although in fact not everyone is capable of clambering. Anyone with a disability must skip the essential physical experience, take an elevator to a landing, look around, and ride back down.
Monuments accumulate associations, both triumphal and tragic. The Vessel’s civic failings have helped make its attraction as a suicide spot one of the salient facts about it. Maybe over time that reputation can be overcome; for now, despite its Instagrammability, it’s famous largely as a place of death. So, what now? As a public artwork on land controlled by a private company, it’s one of the most undemocratic civic monuments in New York: Ross has sole power to determine its fate.
But the most definitive solution, the one that would solve its contradictions as a civic gesture and remove at least one temptation for the self-destructive, would be for Ross to cut his losses and scrap the whole thing. The shiny stairway modules might be separated and recycled as pedestrian bridges, viewing platforms, fire lookouts. When an icon fails, iconoclasm is the only reasonable response.
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