Why This $20 Million Mansion’s Gigantic Home Wall Is Just Plain Stupid

I have built two home walls this year. The one in my garage is 11 feet wide, nine feet tall, and 47 degrees overhanging. The one in the backyard of my parents’ house (where I spent the summer) is eight feet wide, 11 feet tall, 41 degrees overhanging, and set with a 2016 Moonboard. Building these walls was something of a culmination for me: definitive proof that, after two decades of commuting to the gym, I finally have the disposable income to train at home. Neither wall, however, is even remotely as photogenic as the 83-foot mistake currently for sale at 16 Minetta Lane in New York City’s uber-posh West Village.

Did I just say mistake?

I guess I did.

But before I explain, let me first admit that the rest of 16 Minetta certainly looks pretty sweet—almost infinitely nicer than the roach-ridden one-bedroom my wife and I once shared in Prospect Park South. The mansion was designed by architect Adam Kushner, and it served as a primary residence for him and his family for several years. It’s 4,200 square feet across seven floors. It has four bedrooms and five bathrooms. It has multiple fireplaces, a private courtyard, multiple terraces and balconies, a private roof deck, 23-foot living room ceilings, and stylish piles of cordwood providing rustic decoration throughout. The only true eyesore, in my plebeian opinion, is the 83-foot climbing wall.

The wall begins at the basement level and “climbs” up the northwest side (morning sun, evening shade) of an enclosed, glass-topped courtyard. For the first four stories it looks much like any other pre-21st century climbing wall: vertical and brown-tinted, with tape designating certain routes. But then it escapes through a retractable glass roof. And for the next three stories, as you ascend into the air above the West Village, the wall material is glass, which offers the climber sweeping views of Manhattan and allows envious passersby on the street to compete over who can take the least-flattering butt shots.

Pretty cool, huh?

Sure. But you’d think an architect with an $20 million home would have invested in a slightly more interesting arrangement of wall angles (dead vertical being perhaps the single worst angle after dead flat), and a slightly more thrilling set of holds. In photos, the vertical wall is, admittedly, broken by a few large volume, but is it even possible to climb its weird slug-shaped overhang without dabbing against the facade of the building? And those holds! They look like used gym holds from the 90s—chalkless, slippery, and ergonomically fucked. (Jim Boughen’s gorgeous wood grips would have fit the home’s timber-themed decor far better.) When I first looked at the pictures, I immediately thought that while the house looks like it was designed by someone who knows a thing or two about houses, the climbing wall looks like it was designed by someone who knows almost nothing about climbing.

This is sort of—but not exactly—true.  According to a 2021 article about 16 Minetta in Gripped, Kushner began rock climbing in the 1980s and used day trips to the Gunks as an “antidote” to the urban bustle. He never led harder than 5.6 trad, and he never followed harder than 5.8, but he was emotionally devoted to the sport, and he’s since translated the meaning it brought to his life into a design element in his architecture, even (according to Gripped) incorporating a wall used during the X Games into one of his earlier projects.

In this sense, Kushner’s home wall seems designed to serve more of a metaphorical function than a physical one. I mean, it literally begins in a forever-shadowy basement courtyard, pierces a glass ceiling, and loses even the visibly restrictive nature of—well—a wall by turning translucent. It is, quite literally, an escape from the confines of a closed-in city home.

Yet I can’t help but sense that the climbing wall’s upward-reaching, unenclosed nature also—and ironically—mimics a famous feature of one of history’s most restrictive architectural structures: the high towers of a Disney-style castle. This makes sense to me. Because city mansions are a bit like castles, designed to make the wealthy feel separate and safe from the commoners in the street, and the climbing wall at 16 Minetta is little more than a 21st century version of the high tower from which a king, or a prince, or cloistered maiden might gaze while simultaneously submitting themselves to the admiration of those below.

Accidental? I think not. “The city park is right across from us,” Kushner told Gripped in 2021. “We certainly draw a crowd.”

The appropriation of climbing and climbing walls by non-climbers isn’t particularly new. Hollywood has made hay out of misrepresenting the sport for decades. And artificial climbing walls—or their genetically tortured cousins—have been popping up in fairs, parks, weight gyms, and cruise ships for decades, attracting kids and scorn and lawsuits in seemingly equal measure.

But what’s interesting about Kushner’s version at 16 Minetta is the combination of utility and location. This isn’t a state fair. This is a home. Which means that this wall is something that Kushner and his family looked at, and lived next to, for years. And though the wall’s design is pretty mediocre from a climbing standpoint, it is functional. You can lead climb or top rope. You can crimp, drop-knee, or pump off huge greasy volumes. And according to Gripped, the wall hosts—or did in 2021—some relatively challenging routes. While Kushner remains a novice, his son took to the sport pretty well and set climbs as hard as 5.11—though, judging from photos, it seems he either didn’t use chalk or, for cleanliness reasons, wasn’t allowed to, so who knows how hard the climbs actually were.

Of course, the thought of Kushner’s teenage son spending hours hanging on his family’s wall, testing moves, setting 5.11s, and mocking his old man—that makes me happy. But it also makes me a little lonely on his behalf. Because when teenagers find climbing, they generally find a community to go along with it. But I suspect that having a wall like this in your house would inspire the opposite. Does that make him a Rapunzel figure—trapped in his high tower, in need of escape? Probably not. But for most of us, gyms are social—and it’s worth remembering that part of their functionality.

I have nothing against Kushner. If he and his son are happy lapping a vertical wall while the plebes ogle them from the street below—fine. But regardless of how dysfunctional the wall is from a climber perspective, I do think it’s there’s something meaningful about the fact that Kushner’s home climbing wall is being marketed as a central design element of an $20 million mansion that Kushner (a famous and influential architect, remember) considers “deeply philosophical” and “the culmination of [his] dream.”

Meaningful how? I don’t know if I can answer that in any concise and singular way. Perhaps it’s meaningful in the same kind of way that this $1,590 Louis Vuitton chalk bag was meaningful: an implication that our sport is now mainstream enough to be mined for symbolism by people who don’t actually engage in the sport. Or perhaps it’s meaningful in the same way that Eddie Bauer’s decision to fire all its climbing athletes and replace them with Instagram influencers is meaningful: a reminder that, in our late capitalist society, semblance is more marketable than the real thing. Or perhaps it’s meaningful in the same kind of way that recent climbing gym unionization efforts are meaningful: a reminder that our gyms, which were once owned by climbers and run for climbers, are now overseen by executives whose fundamental allegiance is not to their customers or the employees but to the already-wealthy investors who expect the gym to maximize their returns. In other words: a reminder that our sport is now quite literally being defined by wealthy people who have no emotional investment in it.

Indeed, in a full-circle moment, Kushner has been part of that process, too. His architectural firm, Kushner Studios, and his construction company, the In-House Group, led the gut renovation of Brooklyn Boulders’s former home, at 575 Degraw Street in Gowanus, for the Brooklyn Bouldering Project. Brooklyn Boulders was my old local gym, so I can attest to the fact that it was a dilapidated tear-down. There were no showers or saunas or yoga rooms. The roof often leaked. In the winter, frigid air plowed through single pane warehouse windows, and in summer, the place smelled like someone was trying to roast old socks in an oven.

But I’m old enough to remember the days before Brooklyn Boulders’s management ran it into the ground, when BKB—back then the only commercial climbing gym in the city—was a legitimately beloved training hub whose densely set walls and wide range of difficulties attracted folks like Ty Landman, Phil Schaal, and Ashima Shiraishi. So it’s a little sad to know that Kushner Studios and the In-House Group finalized that gym’s long transformation into something very different: a mirror image of every other chichi commercial gym out there. Yoga studio! Coworking space! Yet another gigantic facility that doesn’t have very many problems because we don’t want to pay our setters but we’ll attempt to disguise that by splashing colorful macros across the walls and then quiet dissent from core climbers by throwing a Tension Board 2 into one corner!

Perfect. Just what our sport needs.

But I’ll tell you this: If you gave me 16 Minetta, I’d at least consider tearing it down to build a real rock gym. The sort of core community center that, for a few years, Brooklyn Boulders managed to be. Maybe we can shape some good old timber crimps from those piles of ornamental firewood.

Related: Opinion: Modern Gyms Are Failing Outdoor Climbers

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