This will one day be a Metro-North stop filled with Yankee fans. (Photo by Mark Vergari of The Journal News)
It’s amazing what this city will do for the Yankees.
While a new stadium goes up across the street from venerable Yankee Stadium, the city and its taxpayers are footing the bill for a larger portion of that construction project that anyone likes to admit. Meanwhile, a few hundred yards away, various city agencies are paying $91 million to build the most expensive and largest station ever built by Metro-North.
With a new baseball season upon us and construction at the Yankee Stadium site continuing at a rapid pace, Ken Valenti of The Journal News toured the construction. LoHud.com has some poorly resampled pictures posted of the station under progress. While this concrete platform will soon be a Metro-North crown jewel, for now, things are progressing:
The project has outsized dimensions compared with most Metro-North work. The platforms are 20 to 25 feet wide and 420 feet long, compared with typical platforms 12 feet by 70 feet, Miceli said. Staircases and elevators will connect the platforms with a 10,000-square-foot covered mezzanine, making the walkway accessible to people in wheelchairs. The new walkway will be 25 feet wide, more than twice the width of the one with the curved plastic top, of which only part remains, and connected to the one under construction by the wooden steps. The new walk will make room for 15,000 fans arriving for the start of a game by train and from the parking area…
New York City pitched in $39 million for the project. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is paying $52 million, but $4 million of that comes from legislative earmarks from Rep. Jose Serrano, D-Bronx, and state Assembly members Carmen Arroyo and Jose Rivera. None of the money came from the Yankees.
Of course, the project is delayed with an anticipated completion date of shortly after Opening day 2009, but would you really expect an on-time delivery here?
My biggest concern with the project is, of course, fiduciary. While the Metro-North stop will benefit the South Bronx neighborhoods surrounding Yankee Stadium, I’m a little dismayed that the Yanks couldn’t toss in a few million dollars to off-set the MTA’s expenditures here. The MTA could use the financial relief, and the Yankees are veritably rolling in dough these days.
But either way, this will certainly be a useful station when it opens next year.
9 comments
“The platforms are 20 to 25 feet wide and 420 feet long, compared with typical platforms 12 feet by 70 feet, Miceli said.” — huh? The subway has platforms about 600 feet long, and commuter trains are even longer. Each subway car is 60-75 feet long.
Outside of the city, many commuter rail stations have situations where the doors open for only the first X number of cars. Perhaps they’re doing this here? Or perhaps the Journal News simply had some wrong information. The station plan — available here — doesn’t provide a conclusive answer.
Forget the money—I’m shocked to see some sort of transit construction project actually IN PROGRESS in this day and age.
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If I read the agreements correctly, the yanks were responsible for the cost of the stadium construction. And the city and state were going improve access and egress. The team is spending 1.3B for the park. truthfully teams with a lot less chops screwed there cities and states out of a lot more money and services for a lot less investment by the team. The reason I believe the team is footing the construction costs. At the beginning of all this I read an article in the Hartford courant stating the league would drop the luxury tax if a team paid for the construction with their money. Until the stadium is paid off.
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I agree with you that less money should have been provided for stadium construction, and more of the public money should have gone towards this kind of infrastructure. But it’s great that they are promoting transit, rather than driving, to the games. And if they do the kind of mobilityshed – transitshed planning that I advocate (see http://urbanplacesandspaces.bl.....sited.html) then benefits can be garnered for the neighborhoods served by the station, outside of the impact from the Stadium.
I wonder if the large size of these platforms is a design decision due to the nature of the station: When games end there will be HUGE crowds on the platforms and having a little more room is a good way to make sure it stays safe. I’ve been in train stations in Europe after a soccer game ends and it can get pretty scary-crowded.
I’d pay for a gilded MNRR station over a parking garage any day!
I’ve been saying (to whom? OK, my cat, but still I’ve been saying) for years that all they had to do was put up a simple platform at the stadium. This goes way back before the new stadium construction. All they needed was to pour some concrete and stop the damn trains.
The frills and majesty are nice, but I’d rather not see them act so proud of something they could have done a lot more simply 20 years ago. They could have saved me a lot of time and carbon monoxide poisoning from waiting to get on the Deegan in my car.
And hey, fellow northern commuters, remember all those magic nights when the cops simply wouldn’t let you on the northbound Deegan at all, and you had to go through a bunch of traffic and lights to go south and turn around at 149th St.? Someone still has a punch in the teeth coming over that “strategy.”