The Spur — the very end of the High Line. Before you look north, look up. That thing on the pedestal — the giant sculpture on the platform to your right — is the Plinth, the High Line's dedicated spot for rotating monumental art. As of right now, it's a sixteen-foot, two-thousand-pound, hyper-realistic aluminum pigeon, hand-painted by a Colombian artist named Ivan Argote. It's called Dinosaur. A giant pigeon on a monument pedestal, reversing the usual power dynamic between bird and statue. I respect the commitment.
Now look north.
That cluster of glass towers is Hudson Yards. Twenty-five billion dollars. The most expensive private real estate development in American history — roughly a billion dollars per acre, on a twenty-eight-acre site. It was built by a company called Related, founded by Stephen Ross, who also owns the Miami Dolphins.
The engineering is genuinely remarkable. This whole thing sits on a platform — a thirty-five-thousand-ton concrete slab, resting on three hundred
columns drilled into bedrock between thirty active train tracks belonging to the Long Island Rail Road. Trains kept running underneath the entire time. The lead engineer coordinated drilling around hour-to-hour train traffic, and the whole platform took two and a half years to build with only four scheduled track closures. Then they put skyscrapers on top of it.
But the financing — the financing
