Posted Nov 26, 2014, 6:46 PM
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Join Date: Apr 2013
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http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/n...path/14016139/
NYC transit hub: Bold statement or boondoggle?
Rick Hampson, USA TODAY
Quote:
--NEW YORK — The saga of what may be the city's biggest boondoggle, or what could be its greatest public building since Grand Central Terminal, or both, began at a news conference 10 years ago.
...'Wow' is the first word that's just got to come to your mind," said the mayor, Michael Bloomberg. It would be more than a station, said the governor, George Pataki, it would be "a tribute to those we lost on Sept. 11.''
A decade later, however, the Trade Center Transit Hub has taken twice as much money and time to build as promised. Design changes have made it look more like a stegosaurus than a bird, and it's been vilified by a legion of kibitzers as a political self-indulgence, an architectural ego trip and a money pit — the world's most expensive subway station.
The Hub's neighbors — the 9/11 Memorial, the 9/11 Museum, the nation's-tallest Freedom Tower (now One World Trade Center) — are finished, despite their travails; the Hub is a year from completion.
But what's most striking about the Hub is not the fact that it's five years overdue and $2 billion (100%) over budget; that its funds (almost $3 billion of them federal) could have done more to improve mass transit; that its wings have been clipped.
--The Transit Hub was scheduled to open in 2009 and cost what the Daily News called "a whopping" $2 billion. But the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owned the site, was building a monument for the ages.
"I don't think we can afford not to be grand," said Bloomberg (who as mayor had no direct stake in the project). "What would people say 50, 100 years from now if they look back and thought just because we had a short-term financial problem that we jeopardized our whole future?"
Over the next four years, however, almost everything that could go wrong did
--The cost changed.
Because of the delays, the design changes and the difficulty of constructing an elaborate building on a complex site, the cost gradually escalated from $2 billion at the unveiling to more than $3.9 billion. Meanwhile, the movable roof wings and the memorial plaza skylights were scratched. The mezzanine, a span designed to be free of columns, now had four.
Critics began to turn on the project. New York Post columnist Steve Cuozzo, an early admirer of Calatrava's design, went from declaring the project "ever more unmoored'' to "a catastrophe.''
Nicolai Ouroussoff, the New York Times architecture critic from 2004 to 2011, (who in 2005 said the transit hall "may end up as one of the most glorious public spaces in New York'') now described it as "hollow at its core.''
For these critics, the disparity between the Hub's extravagant design and limited purpose is a pyrrhic victory of form over function.
For $4 billion, the project provides no new track or station stops. It doesn't even serve that many riders. The PATH terminal's 50,000 daily passengers are fewer than those handled by many city subway stations, and 650,000 fewer than Grand Central's.
And, unlike most rail station concourses, the Transit Hall is far from the rails. Transit users still must do a lot of walking to reach other stations.
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