Plan for NYC's Largest Ever Development Comes Into Focus

At 12 million square feet spread over 26 acres atop the rail yards that stretch west from Penn Station, Hudson Yards is the "country's largest and densest real-estate development." With the first, $6 billion phase of developer Related Companies' project set to begin construction in a few weeks, with an expected 2017 completion date, Davidson asks if a private developer can "manufacture a complete and authentic high-rise neighborhood in a desolate part of New York."

"New York has always grown in nibbles and crumbs, and only occasionally
in such great whale-gulps of real estate," observes Davidson. "In the richest, most layered
sections of the city, each generation's new buildings spring up among
clumps of older ones, so that freshness and tradition coexist. A project
of this magnitude, concocted around a conference table, could easily
turn out to be a catastrophe."

"The centrally planned district has its
success stories-most famously, Rockefeller Center. Coordinated frenzies
of building also produced Park Avenue, Battery Park City, and the
current incarnation of Times Square. But this enterprise is even more
ambitious than any of those, and more potentially transformative than
the ongoing saga of the World Trade Center. New York has no precedent
for such a dense and complex neighborhood, covering such a vast range of
uses, built in one go."