Following reports that plans for the western Hudson Yards site would include a massive 700-foot-long wall separating the development from the High Line, Related Companies, the developer behind the $25 billion mega-development, has published a rendering in an attempt to contradict those previous reports. 

(3/4) Our plan has always been to build an open space along the lines of this years-old rendering and we are working to manage the technical challenges to achieve this. There has never been a wall along the High Line and there will never be a wall. pic.twitter.com/KNy9mBEJml
— Hudson Yards NYC (@_HudsonYardsNYC) January 15, 2020

Writing via official Hudson Yards Twitter account, project backers state: "We have always shared the vision that the Western Yard should include a great public open space. We don’t yet have a final design but have always understood clearly that our open space needs to work well with the High Line and the Hudson River."

Rather than presenting a new or updated vision for the site that still meets the previously agreed upon site conditions, however, the newly published rendering appears simply to show a different vantage of designs created by Nelson Byrd Woltz (NBWLA) for the western end of the Hudson Yards site back in 2018. The renderings, first published a year and a half ago by City Realty, were created by visualization firm Design Distill, and feature a flat lawn overlooked by the High Line and surrounding towers. Because the new rendering re-packages the previously unveiled scheme, the image does actually does little to clear up the issue architecture critic Michael Kimmelman brought up in his recent report in The New York Times, namely that the developers were pursuing a new design different from the previously agreed upon proposal. 

As the comparison above illustrates, the new and old renderings depict more or less the same design (save for the snack bar that is missing from the new rendering), down to the placement and types of individual trees. 

In the report, however, Kimmelman describes a new design that has yet to be fully developed. Kimmelman writes: "According to various people who have heard Related executives float the trial balloon, the site would no longer decline toward the river but rise up, as it moved east to west, creating an immense wall, some 700 feet long, just next to the High Line and towering some two stories above it. Related’s skyscrapers at the yard would rise beside and on top of that."

For now, it remains unclear if Related is simply backing away from the "trial balloon" Kimmelman noted or if a different set of plans will be unveiled in the future. In an additional tweet, Hudson Yards appears to sound a conciliatory note, however. The entity writes, "Our plan has always been to build an open space along the lines of this years-old rendering and we are working to manage the technical challenges to achieve this. There has never been a wall along the High Line and there will never be a wall."