January 23, 2021
When I come home feeling tired and beat
I go up where the air is fresh and sweet
I get away from the hustling crowds
And all that rat race noise down in the street
~Up on the Roof; Drifters/Carole King/Gerry Goffin
The Edge is an open air observation deck 100 floors above Hudson Yards. It offers a fantastic view from Midtown’s far West Side, and from up there you can easily see its fellow skyscrapers including the nearby Empire State Building and One World Trade Center downtown. On a clear day, you can see the GWB way uptown, and even beyond.
Besides being the newest addition to our local high altitude viewing perches, The Edge stands out for its unusual design. Looking up from the intersection at 34th & 9 there appears to be a triangular shard jutting out of a tall building farther west. That shard is actually the Edge and it really does jut out from the 100th floor of 30 Hudson Yards.
The Gazette has been meaning to check out this thing for the longest, but what with one thing or another we never got there…until now. And even after such a long delay it didn’t disappoint. We’re not gonna gush too much about it, but it’s a solid recommend. At 30 something bucks a person to visit, you probably won’t be going there that often, but a visit or even two would be well worth the money.
Because of the pandemic masks are required, of course, and admission is tightly scheduled. We showed up at 3 for a 3:10 entry and they told us to come back in 10 minutes. This is mostly because the elevator only carries a few people up at a time to observe social distancing guidelines.
From the moment your ticket is scanned til when you step out onto the Edge feels like an eternity as the line of visitors snakes through a fun house maze that features some mildly interesting lightshow efx and a lot of Hudson Yards/NYC schlock boosterism. If you’ve been to the new WTC it’s a similar experience but not half as cool as the one downtown. In both instances we were like, “yeah, ok, sure,” and impatient to see what we’d come to see.
But once you get through the prelims, the main event is downright impressive. You immediately get that you’re way high up in the sky and that the views are incredible. Even with timed admissions, it was a little on the crowded side the day we visited. That’s partly because once you’re scanned in you can stay as long as you please. Evidently, lots of people besides us decided to linger up there for hours. And we don’t blame them. We went in the afternoon and the light was changing continuously as sundown approached, slowly at first then really fast. Pro-tip: “sunset” entry tickets cost a few bucks extra, so go around 3 or 4 and just stay. You can almost afford a glass of wine up there with the money you save. There’s a take out bar inside, but if you want to sit and sip you have to go back outside and squat on the bleachers reserved for drink buyers. Or you can simply mill around inside and enjoy the view through the floor to ceiling windows that face every direction.
The focal point of the Edge is a glass floor that you can stand on and look straight down. The day we went there was a pretty long line to do just that and a security guard was directing traffic by hollering, “Go! Forty seconds!” and counting down by tens until “Time’s up, let’s go!” We skipped the line and just watched people who had waited on it and the security guy for awhile. Their 40 seconds on the glass was just about long enough to take a selfie, review it, and then take a better one before being shooed away.
That’s about all we can say about the Edge. It was fun and kind of amazing. Interesting. Worth the money. Something different to do for a change. Go. Check it out. 5 stars.
