The Vessel is seen through the windows of the Shops at Hudson Yards on March 14, 2019 in New York City. Gary Hershorn | Corbis News | Getty Images

Will it really work? That's the question some people are asking as the Hudson Yards development comes to life in New York this week. The retail and restaurant portion of the 18-million-square-foot project opens on Friday, including shops ranging from Louis Vuitton and Neiman Marcus to Lululemon and H&M. Online brands like men's activewear retailer Rhone and shoe maker M.Gemi will find a home there. And eateries include those from celebrity chefs Thomas Keller and David Chang, in addition to local favorites like Blue Bottle Coffee and Shake Shack, and a massive Spanish-themed food hall. Still, it will take years for the offices and residential high rises around Hudson Yards to fill up, as some buildings in the neighborhood remain under construction, causing traffic jams and the occasional chaos among commuters. So this glitzy mega mall might need a little more time to prove itself. It likely won't be an overnight success. As long as the blueprints have been coming together, Hudson Yards — at least the one-million-square-foot retail portion of it — has promised to be everything a so-called mall of the future should be. That's as some 1,200 traditional shopping malls across the country — many anchored by struggling department store chains like J.C. Penney and Sears — are undergoing renovations to maintain relevancy, or shutting altogether. Hudson Yards' developers, Related Companies and Oxford Properties Group, in 2010 said they were teaming up to "write New York's next chapter" and build the city's "next great neighborhood." They aspired to create a space for consumers to truly live, work and play — or in this case, shop. It's the formula many real estate developers hope will save malls across the country. But that was nine years ago, and retail has changed a lot since then. Other massive retail projects in the city like Westfield World Trade Center and Brookfield Place have watched tenants come and go. Saks Fifth Avenue just moved out of the latter. Neiman Marcus, the anchor department store chain at Hudson Yards, is, meanwhile, caught up in some of its own troubles, with almost $5 billion of debt. And that's as more and more shoppers are opting to browse the internet, for its ease of convenience, instead of department stores. Does New York really need more places to shop? "If this was just a 750,000-square-foot mall dropped on Tenth Avenue — with just another collection of the retailers you see at a prototypical regional mall — I don't know if you would be able to attract people in a large-scale way," said Michael J. O'Neill, executive managing director of retail services at commercial real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield.

"But [Hudson Yards] hits on every element, from office to residential, that will fuel the retail project and drive traffic," he said. "Ultimately, what is going to make this successful is ensuring from a merchandising perspective that there are unique elements that keep people coming back there." The leasing team at Related has worked, for years now, to make Hudson Yards everything a "mall of the future" should be: extra dining options in place of too much apparel retail, fitness (the biggest Equinox gym in the world will open there this summer) and e-commerce brands to lure millennial shoppers. Mount Sinai Health System will also be opening a "state-of-the-art" facility for clinical care there. In picking tenants for Hudson Yards, "we've assorted ourselves broadly to get a good read on who the consumer is, then we can make adjustments along the way," Webber Hudson, an executive vice president with Related Urban, a division within Related, said. The retail and restaurant spaces are about 90 percent leased at the property, leaving room to "watch sales reports very carefully ... and build into strengths," he added. Hudson said he suspects athletic apparel brands, like Lululemon, will do well at Hudson Yards from the start, meriting more of those types of retailers to be added to the property in time. "You just won't find what we've done anywhere else," Hudson said. Some say the retail at Hudson Yards will be a success because of what surrounds it: roughly 4,000 residences and more than 40,000 workers — at corporations like Tapestry, L'Oreal, CNN and Warner Bros. — will be flocking in and out of the neighborhood each day. "They've basically created this 18-hour city, maybe even a 24-hour city," said Mark Kaplan, principal and chief operating officer at Ripco Real Estate, a New York-area brokerage firm. "You have significant office space and residential units within Hudson Yards. ... You'll never need to leave." "From a retailer's perspective, that means you are going to have constant foot traffic, throughout all times of day," he added. "And I think they've created a retail mix that will be attractive no matter who you are." Again, though, it will take time for that traffic to come. As more of the construction at Hudson Yards is completed, more people should file in.

A view of the Vessel, a 150-foot-tall spiraling staircase with more than 150 flights of stairs, overlooking the city's West Side, opening at Hudson Yards this spring. Source: Related Cos.