Mom has not been to New York in several years, thanks mainly to the pandemic.  In that time, things have changed in the city.  So we took the 7 train and visited Hudson Yards, which I saw in early 2019 when it was under construction.  Now much of it is complete.

The area is mostly a playground for uber-rich foreign nationals and convention traffic.  With the over-the-top glitz saturating every square inch, I am reminded of Las Vegas.  I love Las Vegas but it is odd seeing a vestige of it in New York.  Most everyone wandering the area is a tourist, or from Jersey.  It is quite a juxtaposition seeing Saudi Arabians dressed in their Saturday best next to Joe, a guy celebrating the Jets with every available piece of clothing, except his wife’s coat which he carries grumpily. 

In the center of it all is The Vessel, a piece of art created by British designer Thomas Heatherwick.  This $200 million honeycomb-like structure is 16 stories tall and has some 2,500 steps.  Visitors can travel from landing to landing, enjoying the sublime pastime of climbing stairs that lead nowhere.  Not your idea of fun?  Don’t tell Heatherwick.  He is quoted as comparing his vessel to Paris’s tower, St. Louis’s arch, Seattle’s needle, or Gaffney’s peach.  Finally, New York would have the structural icon it so desperately lacks.  Just one, tiny, little, itty-bitty problem: people used this masterpiece with unnerving regularity to kill themselves, and Related Properties had to close it down. So let’s talk about suicide for a moment.

Suicide is a complex issue we don’t fully understand medically.  Not all depressed people commit suicide, and not all suicides are committed by depressed people.  It sometimes strikes at random, perplexing everyone in the immediate orbit of the deceased.  Sometimes, sadly, it seems just a matter of time before a loved one finally “succeeds.”  Some people use firearms, others use pills, others jump.  They jump off bridges, but not balconies.  Or balconies but not landmarks.  It remains unclear how the individual comes to decide the methodology, but data tells us a counter-intuitive tidbit: time and methodology not only matter, but both must click into place for a “successful” suicide to occur.  If you disrupt one variable, the suicide does not happen.  Though a few do eventually “succeed” through repeated attempts, overwhelmingly most people when stymied ultimately abandon the attempt and the urge fades away.  They live on.  They do not, as popular culture might have you believe, just find another method and act anyway.  

This has interesting implications, like, install higher railings on the staircases.  By doing so, we are actively saving lives.  (Heatherwick has refused to alter the design.)  This has already worked in one instance locally.  Netting was installed on the GW Bridge after years of resistance, citing that a suicidal person would just find a way, netting or not, so why bother?  It turns out they didn’t – netting disrupted the methodology variable.  Telephones on the bridge, which connected vulnerable people to immediate support professionals, interrupted the timing variable.  The result was the same, the person lived and did not reattempt later.

Hand guns are an extremely popular methodology.  Their effectiveness is the problem.  Hand guns are beautifully efficient tools.  Quick, lethal, and irrevocable. States with the highest gun ownership have four times more suicides (via firearms) than states with the lowest firearm ownership.  Comparing those same states, suicides by other means are about equal.  The method matters.  Roughly six out of every ten gun deaths in the U.S. is a suicide.

There’s a lot of literature about this.  I first encountered it in a story by Malcom Gladwell, where he discussed a bump in suicide-by-gas-oven in an English town.  This is how Slyvia Plath killed herself.  Eventually, the gas was treated with additives that made using it for suicide extremely unpleasant, and the number of suicides decreased.  Did people use another method?  They did not.  

It’s something to ponder when you’re aimlessly walking up and down stairs.  In the meantime, The Vessel is closed until further notice.  

I suggest not visiting at all, as it is stupid.