Katie Warren/Business Insider
The one-million-square-foot shopping center has more than 100 stores.
- The Shops and Restaurants at Hudson Yards, a seven-story luxury shopping center, opened to the public on March 15.
- The one-million-square-foot shopping center includes more than 100 shops and 25 cafés and eateries, including Louis Vuitton, Kate Spade, Cartier, and the city's first Neiman Marcus department store.
- The developers are reluctant to call the shopping center a mall, instead dubbing it a "vertical shopping experience" and an "urban retail center."
- I walked through the shopping center on its opening day, and despite the developers' insistence that it's not a mall, it pretty much felt like a mall.
The Shops and Restaurants at Hudson Yards, a seven-story shopping center with more than 100 stores including Louis Vuitton, Kate Spade, Fendi, and the city's first Neiman Marcus, is officially open to the public.
Hudson Yards is New York City's new $25 billion neighborhood, which includes office buildings, luxurious residential towers, and a seven-story luxury shopping center with stores like Louis Vuitton and Dior.
In addition to retail stores, the shopping center includes restaurants from Shake Shack to Thomas Keller's TAK Room, a co-working space, and an interactive art exhibition.
Jeff Blau, the CEO of Related Companies, the developer behind Hudson Yards, said on Bloomberg TV that the shopping center is "not a mall," but is instead an "urban retail center." The developers have also dubbed it a "vertical shopping experience."
The Shops & Restaurants at Hudson Yards is not called a mall because it's designed differently than a traditional mall, and it has a more curated mix of tenants, Kathleen Corless, Related's director of corporate communications, told me on the phone following my visit. And on top of that, she said, Related Companies is not a traditional mall developer.
"We are urban planners and we build cities and mixed-use developments, so we think about the retail center as part of the whole neighborhood," Corless said. "It's about the Shed, it's about the 14 acres of open space, several commercial office buildings, 40,000 people a day are going to work there, 4,000 residences ... It's all about thinking about, who really lives here?"
I took a tour of the shopping center on its opening day. Here's what it looks like.