Or: Why the most important site built on American soil this century has been overlooked
for a meaningless box of stairs.
The last side of The National Memorial for Peace and Justice’s square, where viewers are faced with the innumerable lives destroyed by White Supremacist terrorism in America.
Photo by Jack Walter Mutin
On March 15th of this year, a monument unlike any other opened to the public in New York City. With a price tag of over 150 million dollars, it is centered in the new Hudson Yards development which cost tax payers billions in public subsidies. I am, of course, referring to “The Vessel.”
The Vessel is a far less successful interpretation — perhaps even a bastardization — of India’s Step Wells. Thomas Heatherwick, the designer of the “interactive sculpture,” admits that he drew inspiration from these sites. But what does his rendition represent? The step wells of India served a very specific function, to hold massive amounts of water for public consumption. These vessels afforded the people surrounding them a source of life itself. In contrast, Heatherwick’s Vessel serves the purpose of a viewing platform and perhaps an interesting way to get your flights of stairs in on your Fitbit. Heatherwick will tell you it is a space for gathering, yet there are no benches and sitting on the steps is prohibited. But the Vessel is far more atrocious than an average tourist attraction or interactive Stairclimber. The object is the centerpiece of Manhattan’s latest act of exclusionary housing practices.
The Hudson Yards development consists of around sixty blocks of Manhattan’s West Side. The entire development is filled to the brim with monstrous glass high rises. Comprised of 18 million square feet of commercial and residential space, and over 1 million square feet of retail, the new development will eat up any notion of affordable housing on the once multicultural island of Manhattan. With a one bedroom apartment costing 5,000 dollars a month, the Hudson Yards development is strictly a site for the rich, even if its centerpiece is free to the public. New York City has, for the past decade, had a poverty rate hovering at just below twenty percent. Instead of investing in any sort of public housing, the government handed over 4.5 billion in public dollars to a project which is the dream child of billionaire Steven Ross.
The Vessel has already been compared to another structure that serves little purpose other than a viewing platform, one which also faced controversy upon its completion: The Eiffel Tower. The comparison will surely not benefit the Vessel in the long term, as the elegance of the Eiffel Tower far outshines that of New York’s latest object d’art. While the Eiffel Tower is first and foremost a viewing platform, it was also a monument to human ingenuity, the tallest building in the world upon its completion. It houses a small restaurant and it’s views are unparalleled in Paris due to its placement and height compared to the structures around it. The Vessel, on the other hand, is dwarfed by its neighbors, shorter than even the most basic of buildings currently going up around the island. Though it is a complex build, it is so restrained in its reason d’être, that it makes no noticeable mark in the world of architecture. Far more meaningful and beautiful structures have been erected in the past twenty years. Just last year, one of the most culturally ambitious memorials in American history was completed in Montgomery, Alabama. This site carries far more substance and is more beautiful than The Vessel. And yet, it has been all but overlooked by a structure which holds no meaning whatsoever.
I had the honor of visiting the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama last summer. Before I go on to describe my experience and thoughts on the memorial, I would like to preface this by mentioning how I am very, very white. With my life experience and family history, this site will never mean nearly as much as it will to a person of color. The purpose of this piece is not to hijack the meaning of the memorial, but to instead defend it as the most important site built on American soil this century.
As I walked into the Memorial for the first time, I was struck by the quiet of the mound on which it was built, the heat of the Alabama summer sun on my neck. There were maybe thirty other visitors there, as well as a staff of friendly and respectful volunteers to help answer any questions about the site. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice is a memorial dedicated to those individuals who faced the most outright exemplification of racism in America, that of lynching. The monument itself contains 805 steel monoliths, suspended at a set height while the ground of the memorial slowly slopes down. As you descend, you must look up to see the hundreds upon hundreds of blocks, representing thousands of people of color who were murdered by white terrorists in this nation. Each block stands as a manifestation of a county in America, some contain one name, others contain a dozen or more.
I was beyond dismayed to find that my own county, Shelby County in Tennessee, contained twenty names in total, ranging from 1887 to 1939. The blocks themselves surround a mound of dirt, collected from each county as close to the site of each lynching as possible, bringing the thousands of sites across our nation to one place for contemplation, remembrance, and humble mourning. Outside of the square, there is a collection of identical blocks, laid out as flat as coffins on plinths organized by state. These blocks are here temporarily. They are intended to be sent to each of these counties as a smaller memorial of their own. In this way, the site expands to become a truly national memorial, the first in American history.
The greatest success of the Memorial is that it is not limited to one moment or person of American history. At the start of the site, visitors are confronted with sculptural representations of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, and at the end they are challenged with the discriminatory problems that our society still faces today including the immense issue of Mass Incarceration. Every beat and measure of the site culminates as an exemplary piece of architecture. It all comes together to form a deeper understanding for the viewer, every element serves a purpose. The monoliths hang as those lynched bodies were once hanged. The steel is given a patina reminiscent of the thousands of skin colors of those innumerable victims of domestic terrorism. The circumnavigation required of the site relates to hollowed grounds in every world religion. The labyrinths of Christianity, the Kaaba of Islam, the holiest of sites of Buddhism and Hinduism.
The concept of the memorial itself seemed to be an insurmountable task. How does one go about representing the horrors of lynching in a way which is respectful to its victims, and damning to its perpetrators and the society which allowed it to take place? The answer is as shocking as it is simple. It must be done with honesty. For too long, the concept of lynching has been something foreign, relegated to a specific part of history which took place in the past. The memorial shows how lynching was not something that took place in a vacuum, it is part of a continuum of discrimination perpetuated to this day.
This sequence starts with the kidnapping and import of thousands upon thousands of African men and women into the United States as free labor. It continues through the separation of families in the domestic slave trade. The emancipation of these individuals was held up as an idea of progress, while the mechanics of the Thirteenth Amendment allowed for the continuation of slave labor, provided the individual was imprisoned. Lynching is just a segment in this chain of injustice perpetuated against people of color in America.
The most moving concept of the memorial is the use of the names themselves. Lynching is too often taught as an abstract concept in the American classroom. Placing the names of these individuals on the blocks serves to take away any abstraction, while placing each name in a county can instantly bring one to realize that these atrocities were not relegated to the back woods of the South, as I once liked to believe. These horrors took place in major cities, Memphis, Atlanta, Tulsa, and more. The most haunting moments that I had at the memorial were when I would look up to see “Unknown” followed by a date. This occurs multiple times, and it was in those moments that I realized that even with thousands of names on these monoliths, there were thousands more who were not known, thousands who would surely never be known. It was over a year ago when I visited the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and the thought of those hanging blocks still moves me, it still horrifies me to this day.
The atrocities of the practice of lynching extended far beyond the southern states that America holds as the standard of racism. The block for Tulsa County in Oklahoma alone holds 36 names.
Photo by Jack Walter Mutin
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice far outshines sites such as Heatherwick’s Vessel in every way a piece of architecture can. But the Vessel has garnered far more attention in architectural publications for its location and famous “Starchitecht.” Looking at Google Trends, the Vessel dwarfs the Memorial in searches and number of articles. What does it say about our society that a vanity project relegated as a centerpiece for a multi-billion dollar development receives ten times the amount of press compared to a timely and meaningful memorial to the victims of America’s most vile practice? Public money was spent on the Vessel and it’s surrounding development. New Yorker’s tax dollars went to a project which will only further the disparity between the rich and poor. Yet not a single penny of pubic money was spent to create a memorial to the victims of American White Supremacy.
America was once the capital of architectural progress in the world. The first skyscrapers were built in the states, cathedrals that rivaled those in Europe, bridges that spanned longer than any on earth. We as a society have submitted to the whims of the American Oligarchy. Long past are the days of public housing projects which lifted people from poverty, or public libraries that were the envy of the world. How can we afford billions in subsidies to those who have billions, and not afford to house the hundreds of thousands of homeless individuals across this nation? How can we afford not to teach our children of our mistakes through memorialization? We have been blinded by the same greed which has blinded those oligarchs to our plights.
The only interest that these men have in building these developments is to build monetary interest for themselves. Steven Ross has said in interviews to defend the subsidies he enjoyed that the project employed many people over its development, that he ensures it will not just be a site for the rich. Yet in the same interview, when asked if the pricing of these apartments would go down, he said, “this is the bottom floor.” For Ross and his contemporaries, there is no interest in building for the common good, as much as he would like to perpetuate that façade. Ross’ only interest is in increasing his immense fortune.
In comparison of Ross, there is the founder of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), Bryan Stevenson. With just twenty million dollars, one tenth the budget of the Vessel, the EJI was able to create a monument that outshines that Vessel in every way imaginable without a cent of public money. The Memorial is not just a beautiful and exemplary piece of architecture, it surpasses the realm of architecture entirely to become a sacred space. It cannot be classified as a centerpiece of American exclusionism as the Vessel can. It is the antithesis of this idea. The purpose of the memorial is to teach those ignorant of the plight of people of color in America. In every way imaginable it is far more a gathering space than what Heatherwick intended, because it actually succeeds in bringing people together.
This is the tragedy American Monuments. Millions upon millions of public dollars were spent memorializing Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. But when it comes to building a monument for the victims of America’s crimes, that honor can only go to the victims of foreign wars, the soldiers of Vietnam, the World Wars, and Korea. Instead of investing in public housing, the once multicultural city of New York hands over billions in tax revenue for a billionaires’ playground. The Vessel is only the centerpiece of this fantasy land, and in a way it is the perfect metaphor for it. When you climb the socioeconomic ladder, you reach a zenith to nowhere. One does the same at The Vessel.
The responsibility for the state of American architecture is not only held by the property developers and investors who fund projects such as Hudson Yards. The responsibility is held by architects — especially those as successful as Heatherwick — to take on projects that will not exasperate wealth inequality. Heatherwick and his collaborators surely believe that they are providing a net benefit to the people of New York, and for this I will not fault him. They believe that by providing a public space in the center of an otherwise exclusionary development. Heatherwick believes that the Vessel is a space for meeting. Instead it is an object that begs the question, what do you do when you reach the top?
The reality is that Heatherwick and his partners have done unimaginable damage to the state of housing and living in the city of New York. The Vessel will certainly become New York’s second Time Square, a center for domestic and foreign tourism, and a place to avoid whenever possible for New Yorkers. The developers of Hudson Yards have praised Heatherwick’s design for its multi-functionality. They have misinterpreted the project’s lack of specific purpose for what it is: a lack of any purpose at all.
Two visitors embrace at the section of the memorial with the plinths of identical monoliths.
Photo by Jack Walter Mutin