The new LIRR terminal at Flatbush and Atlantic Aves. is now open for business. (Photo courtesy of New York City Transit)

In 2004, the glaringly suburban and sterile Atlantic Terminal Mall complex opened as the first part of Bruce Ratner’s plan to take over a little corner of Brooklyn that doesn’t really want him there. Yesterday, after $108 million and over 30 months past due, the LIRR’s new Atlantic Terminal Pavilion finally opened.

The new building, designed by John di Domenico, is one of soaring ceiling and natural light that replaces construction tunnels and, before that, a rundown terminal. Sitting atop 10 subway lines and a busy LIRR hub, the new three-story structure is indeed a welcome improvement. According to the LIRR, the building was made of limestone, granite and glass, and its soaring atrium “allows natural light to reach the below ground LIRR concourse and subway station.” The building also features a new ticket office, public bathrooms and a new waiting area.

Efforts to rebuild and replace the Atlantic Terminal have a rather tortured history. The original station, built in 1907, was torn down in 1988, and the area has been in a state of flux since then. (For views of the old terminal, click here and here. John di Demonico’s design was chosen 13 years ago and construction began, with a price tag of $82 million, in 2002.

A.G. Sulzberger of The Times had more:

The completion of the $108 million update to the transportation hub — which has been called “Brooklyn’s Grand Central Terminal” for its approximately 25,500 Long Island Rail Road passengers and 31,650 subway riders each day — coincides with major redevelopment efforts in the neighborhood, including a new mall directly above the station and a proposed $1 billion basketball arena just blocks away.

Jay H. Walder, the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, described the improved Atlantic Terminal as “a place, simply put, that you’d want to take a subway from or to.”

The semicircular outside walls and ceiling of the three-story pavilion are paneled with glass, allowing light to flood through the half-moon shaped atrium — replete with an artistic interpretation of a craggy bluff — and down a granite staircase to the remodeled limestone-clad platform level below. The architect, John di Domenico, said the design remained essentially unchanged in the thirteen years since it was chosen.

While many — from commuters passing through to Borough President Marty Markowitz — praised the new structure, others are dismayed with the anti-terrorist designs seemingly thrown in with little regard for the building. The Brooklyn Paper slames the coffin-like bollards that mar the sidewalk in front of the pavilion’s entrances. Gersh Kuntzman calls the building, airy on the inside, a “bunker” outside, and other architects agree.

“Obviously, the original design did not consider a terrorist attack,” Hayes Slade said. “In fact, the entryway presents a particularly open face to the street, which is aimed at transparency and access. Our society is at an odd transitional moment regarding how we deal with considerations of potential terrorism versus safety, mobility, openness.”

After the jump, a video tour of the Atlantic Terminal Pavilion, via the LIRR’s YouTube account. Read More→

A rendering of the soon-to-be completed Atlantic Terminal LIRR entrance.

For years, the LIRR entrance at the Atlantic Terminal has been shrouded in construction. While the Atlantic Terminal mall opened in 2004 with promises of a rebuilt LIRR entrance to follow, the project has been encumbered by seemingly never-ending delays. Shocking, I know.

While I was away on vacation, The Local, The Times’ Fort Greene and Clinton Hill blog, dug into the causes behind the delay. In response to a reader query into the state of the delays, Michael Szeto uncovered an answer — and a revised timeline — for the project:

According to a spokesman for the Long Island Railroad, the project at Atlantic Terminal will be completed this fall. There are two phases of construction and the final phase is being completed now.

The first phase of the project involved Flatbush Station improvements. It was completed on time in 2005. The last phase centers on the new entrance pavilion that was scheduled for completion in 2007 but “unforeseen site conditions,” according to a spokeswoman for the LIRR, extended the project for two more years. There was a need for additional steel and building materials and the work areas were smaller than expected, which slowed the pace of construction, the spokeswoman said.

It is of course both surprising and not to hear about the reasons for the delay. The project needed more materials and the work space, hardly a secret when the MTA fielded bids on the entrance, ended up being “smaller than expected.” No wonder Mayor Bloomberg wants to trim some of the bureaucratic mess from the MTA and streamline internal operations.

We never hear about the penalties built into the contracts the MTA awards to contractors who can’t finish projects on time or near budget. I have to hope, however, that the authority is not on the hook for what seems to be, over and over again, a faulty bidding system. Getting the lowest bid would seemingly save the authority money, but then again, they get what they pay for.

With Google Transit coming to New York and hypothetical service cuts heading our way, we haven’t had any time this week to talk about this past weekend’s great transit story. So without further ado, may I present to you the Long Island Rail Road, churning out disabled workers since 1966.

The fun started on Sunday when The Times published an expose on the “disability epic among a railroad’s retirees.” Four reporters worked on the story, and Walt Bogdanich reported the shocking news:

Virtually every career employee — as many as 97 percent in one recent year — applies for and gets disability payments soon after retirement, a computer analysis of federal records by The New York Times has found. Since 2000, those records show, about a quarter of a billion dollars in federal disability money has gone to former L.I.R.R. employees, including about 2,000 who retired during that time.

The L.I.R.R.’s disability rate suggests it is one of the nation’s most dangerous places to work. Yet in four of the last five years, the railroad has won national awards for improving worker safety.

“Short of the gulag, I can’t imagine any work force that would have a so-to-speak 90 percent disability attrition rate,” said Glenn Scammel, long one of Capitol Hill’s top experts on railroads. “That defies both logic and experience.”

The quartet’s piece goes on to talk about the economic benefits of this scam and the ways in which those in charge at the Railroad Retirement Board, a federal agency that pays these disability claims, allowed this to happen under their noses. Included in the extensive story are tales about retirees on disability playing golf at 50 and a married couple bilking the agency out of $280,000 annually. I wish I could find retirement that paid so well.

Since Sunday, things have really hit the fan. In quick succession, Gov. David Paterson ordered Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to investigate the railroad’s books and the LIRR’s work rules. On Monday, Cuomo unleashed his subpoena power, and yesterday, Federal Agents raided the Long Island headquarters of the Railroad Retirement Board.

Right now, it’s unclear how this impacts the MTA. While the Transportation Authority is not on the hook for these disability payments, they lose significant man hours to early retirees alleging disabilities, and as members of the RRB, they pay significantly more than they otherwise would in certain payroll and Social Security taxes.

For now, this whole scandal simply looks back. It will provide more ammunition for the opponents of the MTA who feel that the agency doesn’t offer responsible oversight and shouldn’t be running the vital transportation network in the New York City area. As the truth emerges, I’m sure many at the MTA and at LIRR will emerged worse for the wear. Perhaps this is the first step toward better oversight both within and of the MTA. If anything, it’ll force the Long Island Rail Road to clean up its act.