The Empire State Building was originally thought to be ridiculous in scale, too costly, and nick-named “The Empty State Building” because no one could comprehend having office space so high up. And yet 80 years later, it is one of America’s most discernible and loved piece of architecture.

Spend the money now on an architectural monument for generations to come. If you don’t care about architecture, view the price tag as yet another economic stimulus package, caring for the citizens of NY.

“Dissatisfaction and discouragement are not caused by the absence of things but the absence of vision.”

PATH was originally built to interconnect the terminals of a (large) number of long-distance rail carriers, and to connect them to Manhattan. Now most of those terminals are gone, but it still connects Hoboken and Newark to downtown; is it possible that it’s still used for connections to the rail lines at those stations? (Is anyone clever enough to put an electronic schedule board up duplicating the one at Newark, with a sign saying “TAKE PATH X minutes before your train departs Newark”?)

OK, probably this is an insignificant market now. Just a thought though.

Functionally, it’s for PATH.

My guess is the MTA and/or Port Authority did it the way they did it because with Greenwich Street blocked off, sticking the 24/7 entrance on the south side of the street basically created a street-level headhouse like at Bowling Green or 72nd Street — albeit one built into the side of the WTC complex wall — that could span the tracks and allow one booth and one set of turnstiles to serve both the uptown and downtown trains.

I’m just not sure why they didn’t do the same thing inside the complex (though when it was originally built, there really wasn’t much nighttime activity in the area west of the PATH escalators where any entrance/exit would have been, and the thinking might have been putting it on the street would make it easier to get to from other area buildings). And even if they’re going to have the PATH escalator bank slightly to the east of where it formerly was, there’s no reason for the money they’re spending not to make sure the new site has easy access between the new Cortlandt Street station, PATH and the other lines further to the east.

While I know the Cortlandt Street Station, as it was after 1968, no longer could connect to Cordlandt Street, since it was obliterated west of Church, the station access for the No. 1 was possibly the most counter-intuitive of any station in the entire system, pre-9/11 — the least accessible entrances were placed where the most people were passing through, while the 24/7 staffed entrance was placed in one of the least-accessible sites for anyone inside the WTC complex to find. Surely they can’t make the same mistake twice (but we are talking the MTA and the Port Authority here…)

Nothing you’ve mentioned suggests any sort of coordination. It suggests haste. If this is getting things done as quickly as possible, I don’t want to think what getting things done slowly is in New York.