Hudson Yards
The 28-acre, 18 million-square-foot complex on the Far West Side of Manhattan that the Related Companies developed with Oxford Properties Group.
The complex consists of seven levels of retail, a 200,000-square-foot culture shed that slides open, an Equinox Hotel and a food hall that José Andrés curated.
The first phase of Hudson Yards (which had been under construction for seven years) opened to the public in March of 2019, and a second phase was under construction as of fall 2020.
The site is on an old rail yard that many developers had hoped to transform. In the early 2000s, the Bloomberg administration had hoped to develop a stadium in order to secure an Olympics bid. When the state Assembly rejected a $2.2 billion Olympics-related proposal, the site was put up for bids.
Tishman Speyer won the initial bid. It pulled out due to the financial crisis of 2008, however, and Related stepped in.
“It was a very scary moment,” Related CEO Jeff Blau told Commercial Observer in an interview at the opening. “But, in hindsight, it probably turned out to be the best thing. We had a lot of downtime to really think about what Hudson Yards should be.”
During its development, Related secured blue-chip tenants to make the project a success, grabbing Coach, KKR, Wells Fargo and Time Warner. BlackRock announced a $1.25 billion, 20-year lease for 847,000 square feet and, at the end of 2019, Facebook inked a deal for some 1.5 million square feet of office space.
The project was also aided by the fact that a 7 train stop opened there after many years of planning. Several of the shops that opened there in 2019 faced uncertainty after the onset of COVID-19, however. The pandemic forced one of the signature brands at Hudson Yards, Neiman Marcus, to announce it was closing.
