At Fulton Street, a Transit Center rises. (Photo via MTA)
Few projects symbolize the frustration of major public works in New York City quite like the Fulton Street Transit Center. Planned as a post-9/11 revitalization project for Lower Manhattan, the Transit Center was originally supposed to be completed by 2007, but when federal funds dried up in the mid-2000s, the project languished. It will be finished in 2014 and at a cost of $1.4 billion, nearly twice as much as originally projected.
Yesterday, the MTA again reiterated that the project is on time and on budget. Things are actually happening at Fulton Street. The press release has the details:
The Fulton Street Transit Center is more than 50 percent complete and is on track for its scheduled overall June 2014 completion, with the MTA opening up various parts of the complex for public use before then. MTA Capital Construction continues to reach new milestones, most recently installing the first superstructure steel for the Transit Center Building on March 9, 2011.
A 100-foot tall tower crane has been installed on Broadway and steel erection will continue over the next several months, finishing by the end of 2011. One train car length away, restoration of the historic Corbin Building is continuing on both the interior and exterior façade, with the north wall of the building fully restored to allow for the adjacent Transit Center Building to commence steel work. Restoration of the Corbin Building, an 1888 landmark, is expected to be complete by the end of 2012.
The reconfiguration and rehabilitation of the Fulton Street A/C Station is one of the most complicated aspects of the entire complex and continues to progress well. All structural work has been completed on the A/C Mezzanine East and final finishes, including glass tiles and a LED wayfinding band, which are being installed on the corridor walls. Work also continues to progress on the new entrance at 135 William Street which is scheduled to open in July. An additional entrance at 150 Willam Street will be open by the end of 2011 and in 2012 a new elevator will be installed in the station at 129 Fulton Street.
I’m quite curious to see how the LED wayfinding band operates. At some point, it will be operational, and it could serve as a harbinger for technology to come. A few maze-like stations throughout New York could use similar features.
Ultimately, the current progress at Fulton Street is a testament to an MTA without unsettled leadership atop Capital Construction and a steady flow of funds for the project. With money and direction, construction projects in New York can actually move forward albeit at a rather slow pace.
28 comments
I use the Fulton transit center every day. It’s looked the same for the past 2 or so years. Progress!
I don’t know. I use it daily too but I must say, the changes I’ve seen over the past two years are pretty dramatic. From the opening of the southern station entrances, to the closing of the ramps, but more so what has happened in the pit of the main building site. It took them a mildly small amount of time to build the underground workings of the main building and now the steel has been rising above round at a pretty nice pace.
I should’ve been specific, I was referring to using the station to transfer between trains. Nice as the transfers are, the station has looked boarded up and leaking/broken down for a long time now. Understandably, funding has been an issue. Hopefully they do fix it up on schedule.
Unfortunately, the FSTC is the least practical and most frivolous of all the MTA capital projects right now. It’s basically a battle of egos between NYCT’s “Transportation Center” serving a few subway lines and the “Transit Hub” across the street that serves the PATH trains. Neither one, by itself, fits my definition of a “center” or a “hub”, and both have grandiose above-ground structures which will become an icon of the lack of coordination between agencies.
I don’t dismiss the need to realign underground corridors and to add elevators – that will be a welcome improvement – but one aboveground structure, and not two, would suffice.
I know. By the time they finish the Fulton hub and the PATH hub (just a block apart), we are going to end up with a $5 billion transit center. Think of what could have been purchased for the same amount of cash had those buildings been on budget or if we only had one instead of two. A station on the 7 train at 10th Ave would have been nice…
It is an absolutely astounding amount of money to spend given that the expenditure does absolutely nothing to increase system capacity. Right after 9/11 there were discussions about extending PATH a bit further east in lower Manhattan and about bringing LIRR trains into lower Manhattan. Instead we got this. We’ll have much nicer stations, which is something, but the aggregate expenditure on the WTC PATH and FTC could have bought some serious improvements to capacity or speed I would have thought.
This building opens the door for LIRR to Lower Manhattan. That’s still something that’s being considered but obviously the money is not there because a new East River tunnel is needed to make this happen.
AirTrain was also in consideration and might still be but point is when done there will be a place to call home for these lines reducing the cost of potential future expansion.
After 9/11, everything at the WTC site was supposed to be about replacing what was lost with insurance money. Of course things got out of hand over there with plans on going bigger and better. I understand the concept of sending a message of recovery and having a memorial, but there is no reason PATH should be building anything above ground. That’s not insurance money. That was both NY and NJ falling for a gag and financing it. PATH had nothing but towers above prior to 9/11, why the need for a Center/Hub when you are only two train lines. I can see if they somehow found a way to squeeze NJT down there from Hoboken. Now that would’ve made it mildly worth a look.
At least with the MTA, the Feds provided the grant money for FSTC and a new South Ferry Station, but as always with the MTA, they found a way to delay and go over budget when they could’ve had this done back in 2008 at costs coming in under a billion dollars.
Very true — and I’m not saying the Port Authority is right and the MTA is wrong. I’m just saying that having both, without any sort of coordination or consolidation, is absurd.
I don’t believe there are any future provisions for LIRR there either. If LIRR does come downtown, it just might go to the ugly Chambers St. station, where it went from 1913-1917.
If there was a provision for LIRR in there you can bet it would be in the press release. Future LIRR has nothing to do with this project.
Chambers Street station is not ugly, in fact its quite grand, but just needs a desperate renovation.
That would be great to see LIRR go there again, but would it connect? The new trains wouldn’t fit on the WB Bridge i imagine. Could a new tunnel be drilled adjacent to the bridge and somehow connect to the abandoned stub tracks from the JZ nearby? If the logistics worked out, that station could definitely handle the volume, but i don’t think we would see any more Nassau local service.
How about the reverse. Run the J/Z over the R to Downtown Bklyn. Then link it to LIRR Atlantic Terminal. From there, There are a few options:
1) The J/Z could run over the Atlantic Ave Line, over the old LIRR Rockaway Beach Line, to JFK.
1a)There would be a separate frequent Atlantic Terminal to Southeast Queens service. Shift Long Beach runs over to the Montauk Line.
2) The J/Z takes over the LIRR Atlantic Line to Rosedale. A separate shuttle would run between Atlantic Ave terminal and JFK over old LIRR Rockaway Beach. Long Beach service as above.
2a) AirTrain Spur between Howard Beach and the site of the old Parkside Station.
The loading gauges on the BMT and the mainline LIRR are different by 8″.
How does this building open the door to LIRR or Airtrain? The passenger flow is improved, but that’s a relatively small component of what would be required for future LIRR service. If they were serious about preparing for this, they would have built the shell of a station while the whole thing is under construction now.
I don’t see the connection to where insurance money was or wasn’t spent. There was a huge federal gift to Lower Manhattan that was designed to revitalize the area after 9/11, independent of whatever got built on the WTC site.
The same story applies to Grand Central. There was no provisions in place for LIRR, but the building existed above. Same thing in this case. There’s a building there. The station itself would be a river tunnel regardless so it would be at a depth that wouldn’t affect much of the existing below ground infrastructure similar to the A/C platform. But instead of having to construct a building for such a platform. It already exists. John St if possible might be a good street to run said tunnel.
I do find it sort of surprising that a usable station at 10th avenue on the 7 gets cut but marginally useful projects like the FTC don’t get cut. It is mind boggling.
This city is paying for for the 7 line extension while the Feds are footing a majority of the bill for the FSTC project that’s the difference.
There is a lot of money being spent and I can’t deny that, but in terms of FSTC, this project is more so worth it than anything else. Even that PATH structure all for one little fact.
When this project is all said and done. The entire front half of the 4/5 trains will be able do detrain into a transfer or an exit as opposed to only the first car with the rest of the cars detraining into a wall and walking up to the very front of the platform to make the narrow transfer. You couldn’t do that with what was the existing structure above without some extremely costly underpinning. Underpinning the Corbin Building had to be a pretty penny and it’s a narrow building on a narrow lot of Broadway and taking up more lots on John St.
This project still strikes me as a waste. It’ll be nice to have a better Fulton Street, but the money could have been better spent on the SAS.
The Feds have a mandate for funding the SAS in stages as opposed to throwing a boat load of money at it just to watch it go to waste like it did back in the 70s.
The MTA could not take this money and in turn spend it on SAS. The feds provided the dollars specifically for this project.
Maybe the MTA shouldn’t have asked for the project. I definitely would have preferred only one above ground building (the Trade Center site makes more sense, I’m pretty sure it’s bigger), with a underground passage providing free transfer between the Subways (even the E at WTC and the R at Cortlandt) and connection to the PATH. Or, if we had to build the Fulton site, I wish it was provisioned with a lower level shell station for a future LIRR/Airtrain terminal. Even if it would’ve cost more money, those would’ve been worthy projects. Alas, I can dream….
I don’t see how the PATH station make sense above ground considering what was there before. Also considering where people usually are going and a majority of them walk east towards Broadway.
I know about the funding scheme here. I wasn’t blaming the MTA, though politicians could have pushed to do it differently or start another SAS phase – because it’s still a waste.
Convincing the Feds to start another phase with an existing phase still being constructed would be like pulling teeth.
Yes, yes, I know. I was just lamenting the waste.
They are also hoping/planning to recoup (some) construction costs with the inclusion of rentable commercial space.
Most of the commentary here, focusing on how it could be done better, is refreshing as opposed to the usual “could be done faster, which sometimes isn’t a good thing in itself at all. And not just for transit; the World Financial Center as it is today is head-and-shoulders better than the original plans drawn up for it, even if New Yorkers (real and ersatz) had to wait almost two decades longer.
A reference somewhere up above alludes to the PATH/Lex plan, which could have united two disparate transit lines (check the specs; much of the IRT and PATH numbers line up pretty well) with just a 1/4-mile tunnel link. That wasn’t meant to be, so now we have two transit hubs and etc. I’ll concur with most here that such a thing is “wasteful,” while noting that doesn’t make all (or both) a “waste.”
Unfortunately, by slowing projects down many don’t get built and the stakes for each project get higher are fewer are done, they take longer and are harder to modify later. The endless consultation process enshrined in law and policy forces many more errors, but the errors are now on the omission side, as opposed to the comission side. The fact is that fads change, people make mistakes and in my view its better to let policy makers plan and fix things later if they don’t work out. Instead we get generation-long planning processes for stuff that we should have had up and running in the first place.
Most of the folks commenting here seem to be a little confused. There IS a provision for the LIRR Atlantic Branch but it isn’t at the Fulton Center, it’s at the new PATH terminal. That said, both projects for all intents and purposes can be considered one large train station as the PATH hub and Fulton transfer will be connected via an underground passage.