5/29/2023 0 Comments Suicides golden gate bridge 2021It may be surprising that they work so well-if a person were hell-bent on taking his life, wouldn’t he find another way?-but suicide is often an impulsive act. A Swiss study in 2017 found that nets beneath bridges reduce suicide attempts by 77 percent, and that barriers along their edges reduce suicides by 69 percent. The interventions required to reduce suicides by jumping are, thankfully, straightforward. Since the deaths began, activists and the local community board have been lobbying the developers to add architectural interventions: permanent barriers and higher guardrails. After its second, it closed for a few hours after its third, it closed for four months. The truth is that the Vessel is closed because, for the brief stretch that it was open, four people jumped to their death from its staircases.Ī fter its first suicide, the Vessel closed early for the day. I repeated his question to a guard outside. “Can you climb it or what?” a man carrying a Uniqlo shopping bag asked his companion. Some visitors leaned against the barriers, looking up. The entrances to the stairways had been sealed off with black plywood. I went back this month to find the Vessel covered in Christmas lights. In April, guards were herding visitors into the atrium of the Vessel but telling them to go no further. When I inquired again two months later, I got a vaguer response: closed for maintenance. I approached and asked why the Vessel was closed, and was told that work was being done on the elevators it would open by Thanksgiving. Aluminum crowd-control gates enclosed the structure, but I could see two guards inside pacing around, sliding along the railings, and recording each other doing TikTok dances. I visited for the first time in October 2021. It opened in 2019, but the upper floors have been closed to the public since July 2021. But today, the Vessel would be far better described as a period. When renderings of the Vessel’s design were first released, The New York Times predicted that the structure would form an “exclamation point” at the end of the High Line, an exuberant finale to a peaceful stroll. The mall’s developer paid an estimated $200 million for the structure, likely in the hopes that tourists would wander from the architectural spectacle into Lululemon or Aritzia. Among its many features are several skyscrapers, a mall, and an arts center, but its crown jewel is the Vessel, a 150-foot nest of staircases frequently likened to a honeycomb, gleaming rose gold and leading nowhere but up. Today, it ends in Hudson Yards, the largest private development in the United States. The High Line was abandoned in 1980, then reclaimed as a public walkway in 2009. Only when the trains were moved onto elevated tracks in 1934 did the rail line begin to lose its association with death. Eleventh Avenue in those days was known as “Death Avenue.” The cargo train that cut through the neighborhood was nicknamed “The Butcher,” and many of its victims were children who crossed the tracks to bring dinner to their fathers at work in the factories and meatpacking plants. For nearly a century, freight trains ran directly alongside traffic, carrying food to Lower Manhattan-and killing pedestrians, more than 540 from 1846 to 1910. New York City’s High Line was not always high. For support and resources, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 or text 741-741 for the Crisis Text Line. If you are in danger of acting on suicidal thoughts, call 911. If you are having thoughts of suicide, please know that you are not alone.
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