an ornamental mile

It’s been a mile in the making.

“Vessel,” the lattice-like steel centerpiece at Hudson Yards, topped out at 150 feet earlier last week, eight months after construction began on the copper-colored structure.

Conceived by the English designer Thomas Heatherwick, “Vessel” will ultimately allow people to amble up its 154 flights of stairs onto 80 landings, which altogether add up to a 1-mile climb.

Since its conception, the structure has been referred to as a sculpture — more artwork than a functional installation. Heatherwick, whose studios are based in London, used the maze-like Indian stepwells as his muse, along with his belief in New Yorkers’ affinity for good workouts.

“‘Vessel’ is one of the most complex pieces of steelwork ever made,” Heatherwick said in a December 6 statement from Related Companies, co-developer of the project along with Oxford Property Group. “Today we are marking the exciting moment when the last of the enormous 75 pre-fabricated pieces which travelled all the way from Italy to Manhattan, has been assembled ahead of schedule and with astonishing geometric accuracy.”

“Vessel” will anchor Hudson Yards’ so-called Public Square and Gardens, which will comprise about five acres of public plazas, gardens and groves when that section of Hudson Yards, just east of 11th Avenue south of 33rd Street, opens in early 2019.

Stephen Ross, the founder and chairman of Related Companies, suggested the structure would help define the new neighborhood, much of which is being built atop the MTA’s West Side Yard, which is bounded by West 30th Street, West 33rd Street, 10th Avenue and 12th Avenue.

“Vessel” and the surrounding square and gardens “will become the new gathering place for Manhattan’s West Side and a destination for New Yorkers and visitors alike,” Ross, who commissioned the piece, said in the statement. “I look forward to early 2019 when we all can enjoy Manhattan’s newest public space and experience, interact with and climb Vessel.”

“Vessel,” estimated at $150 million, was constructed by the Italian firm Cimolai and shipped to Newark, New Jersey, from where it was transported by barge to the West Side.

Hudson Yards is the largest private real estate development in the nation’s history. The development will eventually measure more than 18 million square feet of mixed-use development and be home to thousands of residents, a public school, hotel and cultural space, dozens of shops and restaurants, and numerous corporations.

Among the companies already there are Coach, L’Oréal USA, The Boston Consulting Group, SAP, VaynerMedia, Intersection and Sidewalk Labs. Time Warner, Wells Fargo Securities, DNB Bank, Kohlberg, Kravis & Roberts will all open offices in 2019. BlackRock, the global investment management firm, will move its headquarters there in 2022.

“By 2025, there will approximately 125,000 who visit, work or call Hudson Yards their home,” said Jessica Scaperotti, a Related Companies spokeswoman.

For now, though, North America’s largest active construction site can still feel deserted. On a recent Monday morning, the mix of gleaming office towers and skyscrapers looming over the steel sculpture is a landscape in progress, exuding a Lego-like aura, and “Vessel”’s appears to yawn, incongruously, in a city on the verge of yet another new dawn.