A tale of two yards.
With the recent release of images for the Hudson Yards next phase, I couldn’t help but think of another NYC rail overbuild site and how its approach might be an improvement over what the Hudson Yards is delivering. I’m referring to the Sunnyside Yard site, a 24-hectare rail staging yard in Queens, NY and the plans by Amtrak and City’s Department of Housing and Economic Development to create a new affordable housing hub
To understand the differences of the two rail yards, it’s important to look at their similarities. The Hudon Yards and Sunnyside Yard sites played a key role in the 1912 McKim Mead & White scheme for the original Penn Station (demolished in 1961). As designed, the two yards book-end Penn Station with Hudson Yards providing rail staging and track convergence west of the Penn station, while Sunnyside Yard forms track convergence for trains prior to entering the tunnel below the East River. Together the two yards facilitated a critical passenger lifeline to mid-town Manhattan.
Separated by 5 Kms, both facilities were formed as open swaths at street level exposing the rail lines below. These open cuts severed communities, damaged the urban fabric, and created a sense of no-mans-land. It was very much an early 20th century “big idea” of creating connectivity on a macro scale at the price of discord and chaos at the micro scale. At the time of designing Penn Station, Manhattan’s gridiron was barely 100 old and its rigidity set the tone for Hudson Yards. Conversely, Sunnyside Yard only reinforced Queen’s grid disarray.
Fast forward to today and cities like New York are re-examining space allocated attributed to rail infrastructure (both passenger and freight) within dense urban centres. Current schemes for Paris, Berlin, London, and elsewhere demonstrate a recalibration of land value where consolidating rail yards results in a “release” of land for non-rail development. Such schemes have a transformative capacity to expand connectivity, improve wellbeing, and advance quality of life while reinforcing rail as an essential asset for sustainable transport.
In this context let’s look at Hudson Yards. To do so let’s abstract ourselves (temporarily) from the quality of the buildings. What we find is a pre-Covid commercial development based of minimising risk and maximising potential return. In urban design terms the scheme is a cut-and-paste of the midtown grid to re-establish the familiar hierarchy of street, avenue, and open plaza. It behaves like it was always there (which it wasn’t) and attempts to “heal” the past by denying it ever existed.
In time the Hudson Yards will play an important role in linking the Hudson River Park green belt to Penn Station’s ongoing redevelopment plans and those of the Port Authority Bus Terminal. It will take time to see how the Hudson Yards will accomplish this and how its economic model can hold up. One can’t help but wonder if a more adventurous approach might have served mid-town better in the long run.
Looking further east, the opportunities at Sunnyside Yard are endless. The Queens site is perfectly positioned to mend fractured neighbourhoods not by emulating the past, but projecting into the future. The 2020 interim report compiled by the City and Amtrak sets the ground for a new community with a forward-looking approach on social value and an investment in affordable housing.
The report frames the need for an over-build project in the context to local needs and wider Queens Plaza growth. It underlines the site’s invaluable resource for multiple rail operators and its ideal proximity to public transport.
The common thread weaving through the 2020 report is a sense of optimism in creating a new vibrant community based on sustainable principles of water retention, energy production, and embedded carbon conscious material selection. The report spells out how it would create 12,000 affordable housing units and how these units would fit within a rail overbuild plinth. It is in this context that daab design Architects envisaged a new community at Sunnyside Yard.
daab teamed up with LERA and Buro Happold to propose a cluster of interlocking sinusoid rings creating inner courtyards and outer looking undulating forms. The stepped massing corresponds to span limits due to constrained column positioning of the dense track alignment below.
The scheme arranges flats within a repeatable quadrant allowing an array of unit layouts ranging from one bed simplexes to 5 bed family duplexes and all units have outdoor terraces. Lift/stair lobbies are daylit and encourage residents to “stop and chat” by providing outdoor terraces looking into the semi-private garden below. Corridors access no more than 7 units to reduce walking distance and promote personable interaction between tenants.
In urban design terms the proposal, although informed by the traditional 240’ city block width, is less literal in how buildings respond. The scheme weaves together two existing grids not by emulating, but by calling out their differences and celebrating the residual spaces of grid misalignment. The result is a sense of healing and rebirth.
The plans to develop Sunnyside Yard are in early days and it is encouraging that the birth of a project is founded on desire to change, not replicate the current condition. Like the Hudson Yards, the overbuild development in Queens will take years to mature and will require buy-in from a multitude of community stakeholders. Let’s hope that the optimism demonstrated is retained and the solution realised can harness change for all.