$25 billion mini-city, Hudson Yards, inaugurated in New York
NEW YORK – A towering sculpture called Vessel – made up of 2,500 twisting steps the public can climb – has opened as the visual centerpiece of Hudson Yards, a $25 billion urban complex on Manhattan’s West Side that is the city’s most ambitious development since the rebuilding of the World Trade Center.
When fully complete, the 28-acre site will include 16 towers of homes and offices, a hotel, a school, the highest outdoor observation deck in the Western Hemisphere, a performing arts center and a shopping mall that also opened in mid-March.
About half the complex is complete, with the rest scheduled to be done by 2025. The opening of the $200 million Vessel and the landscape around it will likely bring a wave of tourists to a rebuilt corner of the city that was previously characterized by a huge rail yard, parking lots and weedy sidewalks once known as a cruising ground for prostitutes.
The 600-ton structure was assembled from steel-and-concrete pieces manufactured in Monfalcone, Italy. Accommodating 600 visitors at a time, it’s 150 feet tall and rises from a narrow point at its base to a width of 150 feet at its peak.
“We needed to have a centerpiece, we needed to have an attraction, a destination – something where you would say, ‘I’ll meet you at,’ ” says Jay Cross, president of Related Hudson Yards, which partnered with the Oxford Properties Group to develop the site. “And we thought monumental art is the way to go.”
The concept was to make something “participatory,” he said of the sculpture, created by British designer Thomas Heatherwick. “The idea was that everybody would just come in and climb it, be able to propose marriage up here, or run up and down, do what
“We were actually very, very, very surprised by the strong demand,” said Jens Boyd, head of revenue management for Thomas Cook Group Airlines. (Thomas Cook Airlines U.K. is the parent company of Condor Airlines.)
Boyd readily admits Condor underestimated the Phoenix market. Phoenix had been on a list for possible expansion for some time, but the airline didn’t anticipate the strong bookings from Germany into Phoenix nor the interest from Arizonans with connections to Germany.
“All the people from the city and airport who told us, though — they were right. We are grateful that they had told us to come and try,” Boyd said. "And we’re happy to be there."
According to Boyd, Phoenix now has Condor's attention and the airline is looking for opportunities to expand.
The low-cost airline targets leisure travelers, so it’s not surprising that its more than 18,000 passengers from Phoenix in 2018 were mostly retirees and students from local universities looking to take extended trips through Europe.
But the airline has also seen strong bookings from business travelers as well as people with ties to Germany.
And Condor isn't the only airline that was surprised by strong bookings and is now looking to grow in Phoenix as a transatlantic gateway into the United States.
Before it even launched its first flight to London's Heathrow Airport, American Airlines said it would make the route year-round. It has been planned as seasonal. American credited strong bookings in Europe for the decision.
Condor has a long way to go to catch up to American's year-round flights. Condor’s business model works kind of like the cruise ship industry: The airline moves planes seasonally to accommodate interest on mostly vacation routes.
For instance, Boyd said, Germans typically want to travel to the Indian Ocean or Caribbean in the winter and to the U.S. in the summer. Likewise, the demand from the U.S. into Europe typically peaks during the summer months.
Combined with its parent company, Thomas Cook Airlines U.K., Condor serves 18 destinations in the U.S. but it has just two year-round routes: Seattle and Las Vegas.
Boyd said airline officials see similarities between Phoenix and Las Vegas in how Condor could expand its service here. They see Europeans being interested in Phoenix as a place to begin a trip around the Southwestern U.S., and they think Phoenix residents may be interested in winter trips to Germany’s Christmas markets.
There’s also opportunity in another lesson they learned about the differences between how Germans and Americans travel.
“Germans do not travel far distances by car, but that is totally different in the United States. So, we do actually see that Phoenix is drawing from a two-hour drive environment,” Boyd said.
So, the airline sees opportunity attract passengers from areas such as Tucson, something called “leakage” in the airline industry. It believes those customers would rather drive here to get to a less expensive nonstop flight and pass through customs in Phoenix rather than in New York or Los Angeles.
“People value nonstop flights, not having to stop in New York or somewhere else for immigration," Boyd said. "So there is definitely an opportunity for us to work with the tourism board of Arizona to build awareness on both side of the pond for traveling to those areas.”