And now it’s gone: the Fulton St. Transit Hub dome

You get the point.

Originallly, plans called for it to be 50 feet tall. Then, rising costs pushed the height down to 30 feet and then 20 feeet. Now, the glass dome that was supposed to sit atop the Fulton St. Transportation Hub is gone from the plans, the victim of inflation and rising construction costs, according to the MTA.

Not only will these rising costs result in a drastically altered Fulton St. plan, but they could impact the other big-ticket MTA Capital Construction projects current in various stages of completion. According to MTA CEO and Executive Director Lee Sander, the MTA will soon begin a review of their skyrocketing capital budget in an effort to cut $1 billion from their four big projects — the Fulton St. hub, the LIRR East Side Access plan, the 7 line extension, and, yes, the Second Ave. Subway.

William Neuman of The Times has more on what is sadly an unsurprising and familiar story for those of us waiting for the Second Ave. Subway:

Soaring construction costs could force the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to scrap plans for an architecturally ambitious glass-domed subway station in Lower Manhattan and lead to more than $1 billion in cost overruns for the authority’s major expansion projects, officials said Monday.

The rising costs could slow progress on the three so-called mega-projects needed to expand the capacity of the public transportation system, including a Long Island Rail Road link to Grand Central Terminal, a westward extension of the No. 7 subway line and the first leg of the Second Avenue subway.

The news represents another setback for the subway station project, known as the Fulton Street Transit Center, which was envisioned as a central element in the recovery of Lower Manhattan after the terror attack of Sept. 11, 2001.

“We’re just in the middle of a construction inflation crisis,” MTA Chairman Dale Hemmerdinger said. “And from our point of view as an agency that spends an awful lot of money, this is not good news.”

While the future of the first phase of the Second Ave. Subway is ensured — the MTA, according to Sander, has the money from federal sources to finish the project — these budgetary problems may cause delays in all four major construction efforts, and the future of the Fulton St. hub’s outside appearance is very much in doubt. This fiscal crisis reached a head at the end of 2007 when the MTA put out a call for bids for the contract to build the ornate entrance to the hub including the dome. The contract, budgeted at $370 million, received one bid for $870 million. Back to the drawing board went the MTA.

Now, the authority plans to chop that contract into smaller pieces. They anticipate finishing the underground work at Fulton St. by the end of 2009, but the completion date for what once was touted as Grand Central South is anyone’s guess. “I’m sad to say that we cannot build the transit center as currently envisioned in this market with the budget that we have,” Sander said.

Yesterday, in the comments to my piece on the anticipated cuts to the Fulton St. dome, ScottE wondered if the MTA is overshooting on its plans. Does ever new project really have to be the crown jewel of the MTA, he wondered.

Scott raises a very valid question, but in this case, I don’t think the MTA was aiming for the stars only to miss. The Fulton St. Hub, when completed, will be one of the most trafficked stations in the subway system, and it was, as Elizabeth H. Berger, head of the Alliance for Downtown New York, told The Times, supposed to be “center of our future.” But with a recession on our hands and constantly rising construction costs, the MTA is nearly back at square one. Now they just have to figure out how to design a new symbol for downtown while staying at or near budget. That is no easy task for an agency long beset with fiscal problems.