Westworld on the West Side

like so many dreamers before them, Westworld’s synthetic-flesh-and-circuit creations have finally made it to Manhattan. Perhaps it was inevitable that even the AI-powered soul-mining androids that broke out of their desert-fantasy resort in season one would be drawn to this maddeningly irrational city—to fix it, to own it, to remake it in their image. The algorithmic creature-in-chief, Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson), becomes a goddess in season four because moving here puts an entire populace within earshot of a single giant transmission tower that deafens everyone into total obedience. If you can make people do anything there, you can make people do anything everywhere.

There are 8 million stories in the Westworld city, and I have given up following them. I have lost track of who’s human and who’s synthetic, or who used to be one and then became the other. I can’t remember who is legitimately alive, how many times they’ve died, whom (or what) they’ve killed. I have, however, cottoned on to the show’s main philosophical tenet: This world of ours isn’t real. Or some of it is and some isn’t, but you can never tell which.

New York is where the show’s human-built and AI-designed realms adjoin. Production designer Jon Carlos’s challenge was to adapt an actual city to this universe. “Hale has a stunted version of human growth,” he told me. “Under her control, the city is frozen in a moment of time. She has no need to keep advancing their human culture.” Conveniently, that means Carlos and his team didn’t have to make up a future city from scratch. Hale’s city-state is so behind the future times that it bristles with early-21st-century supertall towers imported from a half-dozen other major capitals (I thought I caught a glimpse of the Shanghai World Financial Center in midtown). There’s no need to dream up what AI-powered architects would devise. We already know: furry, foliated structures draped in greenery and gossamer weaves, designs that look too warm and whimsical—too human—for Westworld. And so Carlos did what sci-fi designers always have done: conflate the fantastical with the extant. That’s how the sleekest new architecture in the early 2080s turns out to be … Hudson Yards. Cloud-colored and asymmetric, angular and bulbous, it evidently resonates with the artificial-city planners of centuries hence. There’s no better metaphor for a world of soulless parahumans unable to distinguish life from performance.

What’s it like to live there? Horrifying. It’s a city populated by slender 35-ish-year-olds in structured outfits of gray, silver, pewter, and charcoal. They have both less and more to worry about than we do. Muggers, rapists, and lawless bikers are extinct. The streets are miraculously free of vendors, scaffolding, traffic, public transit, old people, children, and the homeless. On the other hand, an individual’s brain is a robot’s plaything.

Westworld’s New York, like ours, is a megalomaniac magnet. Hale’s nonhuman superpowers give her a malevolent divinity that she unleashes on the stylish innocents of Crosby Street in Soho. One blink from her, and passersby freeze in place. Another, and they start waltzing to a tune she demands of a bloody-fingered busker. A word, and three women fold themselves balletically into a human throne for her.

That notion—a city full of quirky individuals becomes a hive of drones—is a perennial nightmare. The extras’ costumes are unisex updates on the gray flannel suit worn by the Organization Man, a phrase invented by the sociologist-urbanist William H. Whyte in 1956. “Man exists as a unit of society. Of himself, he is isolated, meaningless; only as he collaborates with others does he become worthwhile, for by sublimating himself in the group, he helps produce a whole

that is greater than the sum of its parts,” Whyte wrote. Hale could almost have delivered that speech herself. In the 1970s and in his 1980 book-and-film combo The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, Whyte analyzed how urbanites conduct themselves in public and found that most of us, believing we’re making individual decisions about where to sit or linger, behave as predictably as ants. If the Crosby Street dance scene seems at once surreal and plausible, it’s because it takes the reality that Whyte observed for a surreal spin.

Even in a regimented future, there will always be New Yorkers with the stubbornness or bad luck to perceive the workings of the system in ways the rest of us can’t. A Ratso Rizzo. A Travis Bickle. Westworld has a High Line mutterer who sees an invisible tower but never develops into a character. And then there’s Dolores, the shape-shifting unkillable host who evolves from sweet li’l thing to mass slaughterer. Now she has acquired a new identity as Christina (Evan Rachel Wood), a full-time copywriter at a game-design firm complete with a Lucite cubicle, a smirking boss, and a benefits package that includes four sick days a year. It’s as if Bonnie and Clyde took desk jobs at Dunder Mifflin. Except that Christina’s office is on a high floor of the KPF-designed tower at 55 Hudson Yards, menacingly trimmed in gunmetal steel. In this future New York, the subway still doesn’t have elevators, and not even fulltime writers get to work from home. (In the 60 years between our time and hers, the city has developed according to the same pre-pandemic market projections for column-free high-rise office space that are currently being used to justify upzoning the area around Penn Station.)

Christina’s world is a constrained one. Every day, she wakes up in her small bedroom and presses a button to stow the Murphy bed (which, since this is the future, flips up with a metallic swoosh). She lives on a low-rise block of what might be the West Village (but exists only on the Warner Bros. back lot), the sort of pedestrian paradise that reallife activists pine for. Instead of traffic, parking, and garbage, there are strips of flood-absorbent turf, motion-activated lampposts every dozen feet, café tables, street trees, bioswales, and greenery in planters that double as benches. This is how humans want to live, the set suggests, so maybe Christina has come over to their

side. And now she’s the elect: the otherwise ordinary one who pierces the scrim to see where power really lies.

Her commute is short. She climbs the stairs to the High Line at 30th Street and strides downtown toward the irresistibly

sci-fi 520 West 28th Street, designed by Zaha Hadid. She apparently reverses direction between cuts because we next catch sight of her heading uptown from West 13th Street as Jeanne Gang’s 40 Tenth Avenue glimmers over her shoulder, its concave façade like a curtain encrusted with black diamonds. In this context, these actual buildings look fictional—and so do the birds that lie concussed on the sidewalk outside Christina’s office, a well-documented problem.

Floating just out of Christina’s consciousness is an invisible Host City in the harbor, an archipelago of white cubes reachable via a long causeway. In real life, the recently renovated Pier 34 starts at the end of Canal Street. In the show, it leads to the hosts’ HQ, digitally airlifted from San José del Cabo: the Viceroy Los Cabos resort, designed by Miguel Angel Aragonés in 2016. Although it was built as a pleasure zone for humans, the pileup of white boxes hovering on the water makes a convincing stand-in for an icy urban habitat. The “nest,” as Carlos calls it, is the robots’ Rosebud, the key to their primal memories. Above it rises the Kane-like seat of power: the sky-piercer so immense and fearful, so unimaginably advanced that it looks almost exactly … like the Montjuïc telecommunications tower in Barcelona designed 30 years ago by Santiago Calatrava. If, in the 2080s, New York is stitched together by whatever kind of cable comes after the kind that comes after fiber-optic, why are they still using an overgrown broadcast antenna?

In episode seven, a new urban character appears: Times Square. The hosts, being self-sufficient and apparently not acquisitive, have no use for advertising or entertainment. They have vanquished capitalism, which makes me wonder why New York still exists and who put up all those towers. And so, instead of a forest of garish come-ons, Times Square’s billboards have become a forest. Greenery sways on every LED panel and curtain wall to a soundtrack of digital chirps. (The effect is oddly reminiscent of today’s Rainforest Cafe.) The facsimile of wilderness isn’t soothing, though; rather, it reinforces the atmosphere of stultifying tranquility. Only in the finale does the façade of fake nature start to fray, as the memories of old ads flicker just below the surface like the ghost signs that sometimes reappear in our New York when a building comes down. Those flickering images are signs of life, of will, of memory, at least in the show’s gloomy outlook. After years of humans gradually devolving into androids, we’re left to grasp at a wisp of independent thought: I used to shop, therefore maybe I still am.