‘A suicide machine’: how Boris Johnson’s pet designer created a $200 million disaster

Smack in the middle of Hudson Yards, a record-breakingly expensive high-rise development on New York’s West Side, sits The Vessel. It’s a 150-foot, 16-storey, open-air lattice of bronze-coloured staircases – a blunt incongruity among the sharp skyscrapers.

What exactly this structure is meant to be depends on who you ask. (The fact that it has never shed what was intended to be a temporary name speaks to its identity confusion.) To its celebrity British designer Thomas Heatherwick – he of the revamped Routemasters, the Olympic Cauldron and Boris Johnson’s ill-fated Garden Bridge – it is a “device”. To its billionaire sponsor Stephen Ross, CEO of Related, the real-estate conglomerate behind Hudson Yards, it is New York’s answer to the Eiffel Tower (a contention bold enough to justify, to his mind at least, the $200 million it cost).

But to the New York press, fierce defenders of a city slipping ever closer to becoming a playground of the wealthy, The Vessel is a “grotesque monument to a rich man’s vanity”, a “giant shawarma”, a “staircase to nowhere”. And to your average New Yorker, it represents death.

Last week, a 14-year-old boy became the fourth person to take their own life at the site. The first suicide happened in February 2020, and two more followed in January this year, at which point The Vessel was closed for safety adjustments. Only two months after reopening, another tragedy took place. The Vessel has now been closed again, indefinitely. “I want to see every possibility we can do [sic]. I mean, we thought we had covered everything,” Ross told The Daily Beast.

Not everyone would agree. As far back as 2016, two years before The Vessel opened, architecture critic Audrey Wachs was warning that the waist-height railings around the staircases would fail to prevent deaths: “When you build high, folks will jump.”

Three suicides in the early 2000s at New York University’s Bobst Library – which originally featured internal open-air balconies – offered both a warning and an easy solution. Metal grids were added to the Plexiglass barriers at Bobst in 2009; there has not been an injury since. Both suicides and attempts decreased at the George Washington Bridge between New York and New Jersey after netting and an 11-foot-high fence were installed in 2017. Numerous studies suggest that barriers of a sufficient height – and not necessarily a view-impeding one – are effective at preventing loss of life. Yet The Vessel opened in 2018 with no design adjustments.

Carla Fine, who has spent 40 years writing about and talking to those affected by suicide, since her husband took his own life in 1989, and who lives in Chelsea, eight blocks from The Vessel, says the danger of the structure was obvious from the moment it was unveiled. “I don’t want to sound like Cassandra,” she tells me, “but I knew what was going to happen... It’s a suicide machine.”

After the first death at The Vessel in February 2019, Fine raised the matter at a public meeting of the local community board. In March, representatives of the board wrote to Andrew Cantor, senior vice-president of Related, urging the company to install higher safety barriers – but it took no action. Over the next year, Fine wrote repeatedly to Related, as well as to Heatherwick Studios, urging them to take the matter seriously. When the next two suicides happened, she was still waiting for a reply that never came.

The Hudson Yards development was no stranger to public resistance. It cost $25 billion, took 18 years to plan and build, and is, in the words of New York magazine’s architecture critic Justin Davidson, “a billionaire’s fantasy city” made up of “super-tall office towers full of lawyers and hedge-funders, airborne eight-figure apartments, a 720,000-square-foot shopping zone and a gaggle of star-chef restaurants.” Objections from locals, on the grounds that it was helping to make the city unaffordable to ordinary people, were many and loud.

That may be part of the reason that Ross – the octogenarian whom another New York magazine writer recently labelled “the most powerful man in New York” – was so intent on building something non-functional in the centre of the development, something that would capture peoples’ imaginations and, perhaps, change their minds. He wanted to create the city’s answer to the Eiffel Tower or Trevi Fountain; something “transformational, monumental”, he told Fortune magazine.

Ross was rumoured to have originally considered Anish Kapoor, Jaume Plensa and Richard Serra for the job of designing The Vessel, but he was worried their fame would undercut the design’s surprise. But Heatherwick’s pitch captured him: “I knew that it was so iconic, so different, so unique,” he told New York magazine. “When you do something so monumental, it will affect human behavior.” Presumably, he was not referring to suicide.

Secrecy enveloped The Vessel’s construction: a 20-foot fence encircled the steelworks in north-west Italy where the parts were made, to protect them from snoopers. Once they had arrived in America, they were transported to the construction site by tugboat along the Hudson. The unveiling in March 2019 was mired in an ugly tussle over who had the ownership rights to photos taken on the site. Related claimed that it could use, for promotional purposes, any photo of The Vessel posted online, without awarding royalties or due credit. After an outcry, the company backed down – but not before relations with the local community had soured further.

When The Vessel was closed in January this year, following the third death, Fine was among those who hoped that safety was finally about to become a priority. Related spent months in consultations with suicide-prevention experts, security experts, and local elected officials about ways to limit further deaths at the site, a spokesman told The New York Times.

But when The Vessel reopened in May, Fine and many others were shocked by the inadequacy of the measures the company proudly unveiled: an entry fee of $10 had been introduced (access was previously free), and a “buddy” system put in place, meaning visitors were no longer allowed to enter alone. Signs with “messages discouraging suicide” had also been installed. Of higher barriers, however, there was no sign.

“If you want to kill yourself, usually you go ahead and kill yourself. Ten dollars doesn’t make the difference,” Fine says. The fact that Related was about to make a profit from the deaths to which its site was linked is also fairly unpalatable. She was disturbed, too, by reports that security guards had been given training to spot those “with the profile” of suicide risk. “What is the profile of someone who kills themselves?” she says. “They’re just young people, probably minimum-wage workers, and now they’re saddled with all this guilt? It’s terrible.”

As for the “buddy” system, its inefficacy has been horribly proven: the teenager who took his own life this month was at The Vessel with his family. From all its months of consultation with suicide prevention experts, it is hard to see what knowledge Related gained. In response to The Telegraph’s request for comment, a spokesperson for Hudson Yards, Kimberly Winstons, said: “We are heartbroken by this tragedy and our thoughts are with the family of the young person who lost their life. We are conducting a full investigation. The Vessel is currently closed.”

And where is Heatherwick – someone with no formal training in architecture – in all of this? In a statement to The New York Times, Heatherwick Studios said that it was “distraught” by the deaths, adding that it had explored several ideas to improve safety, which “required further rigorous tests”, and a determination of what would be “feasible in terms of engineering and installation”. It is difficult to see how either of those considerations applies to higher safety barriers. An employee who spoke anonymously to the same newspaper said that the Studios had designed such barriers “a while back”, but did not say why they had never been installed.

Fine remains baffled. “Maybe [Heatherwick’s] vision was for his architecture to symbolise death and dying. Maybe it was a dark vision, I don’t know. But how has he responded? He has never addressed the deaths. Why hasn’t he come out and said ‘I’m sorry’?”