Sunnyside Yards Master Plan 2.0
Amtrak, NYCEDC in need of better design vision
It’s 2025, and New York still hasn’t learned any lessons from the Hudson Yards sh*tshow. As far back as 2008, critics like the legendary Ada Louise Huxtable were lamenting the poor process in the Wall Street Journal. There was some scattered praise for one proposal, the Extell and Holl master plan. But it was mostly lost amid a wave of Bloombergian dealing.
The thwarted Extell plan featured a suspended deck park, white housing towers on the edges (similar to successful Holl China projects like Linked Hybrid and Sliced Porosity) and an iconic composition that was up to New York City standards of Rockefeller Plaza and Central Park.
Instead, the Bloomberg bureaucrats chose another plan. The more expensive, less environmentally friendly, worse design. The Related master plan we have today is a mess of glass grid urbanism, half-built, and already out of date. The traditional column decking was twice as expensive, and dubious tax schemes were created to fund it. Giant missed opportunity.
The 2020 master plan to develop Sunnyside Yards in Queens follow the exact same bad ideas, run by the same anti-design people. The outdated glass towers have been softened with brick — hey it’s not 2008 anymore — but the fake McUrbanism is still rancid.
The idea here, presented by Amtrak and the NYSEDC, which never had a good design idea in its life, isn’t all bad. Whoever slapped this together has obviously been to Europe once and knows a good courtyard grid. The main rail line remains open to the sky, which kind of makes sense, but not really. The whole thing reeks of design by committee. Meanwhile, the public could smell mediocrity a mile away.
Hey look, some green space and seats! Wow, it can’t be that bad! Oh wait, why are there semi-transparent buildings in the middle of Queens again? (You can tell when the design is not there, the opacity filter goes down to 60%) Something-something about 12,000 residential units, yet you’d think there would be a lot more at that density.
Overall, it’s just kind of your typical blah McUrbanism developed by committee to be loved by nobody. It’s no wonder the community rejected it and the project fizzled. Where’s the design vision? What are you giving to the community?
Hudson Yards shows that they are right. The community gets nothing. No taxes (Hudson Yards still enjoys massive subsidies) and no real public space.
Luckily, the Amtrak NYCEDC Master Plan died in 2020 after the COVID pandemic. It seems like nobody wants to continue that lifeless plan. But maybe New York should learn from its mistake and start offering the community design vision and quality. People can see when you are tricking them.
A real design vision doesn’t need fake earthy tones and benches. The Extell Holl Master Plan for Hudson Yards (and the Sliced Porosity project in China) focus on creating grand public spaces in the middle from which the buildings surround. The Hudson Yards suspended deck saves money, collects water and is minimally invasive to the tracks below. The same design strategy could be used to cover the entire rail track at Sunnyside and fully connect different sides of the site without the awkward bridges in the Amtrak Plan.
It seems unlikely that anything good will happen at Sunnyside Yards will come to pass, since the key players are unchanged — the NYCEDC is still running things, Amtrak has no idea what it is doing, and the New York Times remains on the payroll of the Real Estate and Ford Foundation. None of these interests is on the side of design, but they should be. Without it, the project may not happen at all. Not even Hudson Yards is fully developed at this point after 15 years.