“High places cause suicide. High places must be eradicated.”
In the summer of 2021 I spent a week in NYC and visited this sculpture just by chance as it was down the street from my hotel and was near MSG. They were having a big event and the entrance was closed, which I thought at the time was due to the event, only now am I discovering the actual reason.
While I understand the premise of restricting access to mitigate suicides, this seems to be a solution to a symptom and mostly a public perception stop gap. This does not prevent suicide to any significant degree.
If a structure is built for recreation, as a kind of thought exercise, and novel touristic destination and then it’s used as a tool of self destruction by a few people suffering from mental illness, maybe the actual solution is to stop investing in constructing “art” pieces and start investing in solving why someone would want to jump off your sculpture to begin with. After all art is a societies expression of success when all other necessary needs are met, otherwise your art is exploitation.
Funny you mention that, given that the installation (and the area around it) were developed by syphoning off money ment for affordable housing programs for Harlem
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-12/the-visa-program-that-helped-pay-for-hudson-yards
Either close down Walmart or open this thing back up
Prime exhibit of what a corporate ghetto looks like.
And this is why we can’t have nice things; it sounds terrible, but there should be a limit for how responsible we as a society need to be for the actions of individuals.
I would argue there are limits. An art piece being used as a suicide booth falls into the category of not being essential enough that it must remain openly accessible to the public. A bridge or train tracks being used for suicide should not be closed off.
False.
We can’t have nice things because corporations and the wealthy take an ever increasing share of a limited pool of resources and waste them on nonsense for themselves.
Also, if you design and build something and then the suicide rate increases, and then you remove that something and the suicide rate decreases, it throws entirely into question how much free will actually exists and whether the idea of “personal responsibility” even makes any sense.
And regardless, suicide is an inherently somewhat transient and impulsive choice. All the stats show that suicides are more likely to happen when you give someone easy opportunity (think guns), and just because someone attempts to kill themselves, doesn’t mean they will again. Yes there are natural high points in a landscape that people will be tempted to jump from (look at the cliffs of Dover for instance), but that doesn’t mean we need to build artificial ones in the middle of a depressing concrete jungle with millions of people.
Personally I really like the vessel and the architect behind it, and do wish I could have gone up it when I was there, but I also do think that in hindsight, it is an inherently problematic design that should not have been approved.
Some Inception-looking shit.
