It’s January, 2021. I’m walking Morris around the Vessel. It’s where he poops every morning, like clockwork.
Only this time there is police tape everywhere. Again. Janitors with buckets are cleaning an enormous, chunky bloodstain from the ground. This is the third time in under a year someone has heaved themselves off the top of this thing and plummeted to their death. Turns out the guy was running from the cops after murdering his mother. It’s grim, and it certainly hasn’t helped the mood after the year we’ve had.
It’s a giant honeycomb-structured alien spaceship, sometimes called “The Hive” that landed at the end of The Highline in Hudson Yards around 2019, and aside from it being one of the biggest influencer and tourist selfie-hives in New York, it is one of the most divisive structures among local New Yorkers.
Unfortunately, The Vessel’s open design by Heatherwick Studio presented safety challenges. In January 2021, the structure was closed after a third suicide in less than a year.
It reopened in May 2021 with new measures in place to deter self-harm attempts — this meant that visitors were only be permitted in pairs or groups in a bid to increase safety. Notably, after months of consultation with experts, developers had decided against raising the height of the barriers.
Although solo visits were banned, it was a teen visiting with his family that became the fourth to commit suicide. Thus, these measures proved insufficient and The Vessel was closed again in August 2021. Related Companies has not yet announced an exact opening date, but is looking forward to welcoming visitors later this year.
I climbed to the top of the Vessel in 2021.
It was when it reopened under the ‘Buddy System’. You had to buy a free ticket on Eventbrite and go up with a friend, or a stranger (as if that was a perfectly effective measure against suicides.)
The state of mental health in the US in 2021 was a dog’s breakfast; with many furloughed without healthcare, we’d all been locked inside and cowering beneath masks for months, and even the most optimistic of New Yorkers were buckling at the knees at the prospect of yet another variant of The Virus crippling the city again.
Gosh, I looked so attractive during the pandemic…
It’s a dizzying view, and when you’re at the top… it does tickle that little voice in the back of your skull that says, “What if you jumped?”
You look down and it immediately gives you vertigo. But it’s art. So …you know. Enjoy it. Chelsea is full of galleries, art pop-ups, and The Art Shed, so it would stand to reason that we have some gargantuan and controversial chunk of rose gold Insta-fodder right at the heart of the neighborhood. (There’s talk of building a giant ugly casino here… people are just thrilled about the idea. 😳)
It should go without saying, that most of the unfortunate souls who jumped needed healthcare, and whether they were receiving it or not, should not have been so easily able to climb such a dangerous structure.
The safety barriers weren’t raised (for aesthetic reasons, I assume?) when it reopened. The next suicide closed it indefinitely. Since then, it has just been a backdrop to thousands of duckface selfies.
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