New York City's Hudson yards: The Vessel will get a new name

It won't be the Vessel for much longer – New York City's new landmark is currently subject to a public naming competition. And certainly, the Thomas Heatherwick-designed, beehive-shaped staircase is giving the public plenty more to ponder.

The most distinctive feature of the first phase of Manhattan's $US25 billion Hudson Yards development is a $US150 million, nearly 46-metre-tall sculptural feature – a shiny copper, overgrown jungle gym of sorts. It features 154 flights of stairs, 80 landings (plus a lift for people with mobility issues) and fabulous views.

The soon-to-be-otherwise-named Vessel opened the same day as most of the Hudson Yards development's retail and public spaces including a seven-storey shopping mall and plazas. High-end residences, offices, gardens and parks, a soon-to-open theatre and galleries complete the new neighbourhood, the biggest private real estate development in US history. It sits over old rail yards near Chelsea and took seven years to complete.

And it's been met with predictably mixed response, given New York is a city about which people are passionate and protective and whose appeal and fame rests on organically grown charms. The esteemed Chicago Tribune critic Chris Jones described Hudson Yards as " … a scary, sanitised, curated future world of experience-based luxury where the human need for storytelling has been expertly hashtagged, progressive values branded and commodified," before comparing it to Dubai.

The New York Times' Michael Kimmelman called it " … a supersized suburban-style office park, with a shopping mall and a quasi-gated condo community targeted at the 0.1 percent."

None of that seems to be bothering the swarms of visitors to the Vessel, getting free entry tickets via the Hudson Yards website – but not before agreeing to terms regarding ownership of photography and video. The restrictions are also not stopping plenty of social media posting – and superlatives.

See hudsonyardsnewyork.com