http://www.nypost.com/seven/07062009...ose_177822.htm
OBSCENELY GRANDIOSE
A PATH STATION LARGER THAN GRAND CENTRAL?
July 6, 2009
EVERYONE knows the Port Authority's planned World Trade Center Transportation Hub is huge. The PA celebrates the fact, boasting on its Web site that the Hub "is comparable in size to Grand Central Station."
We'll forgive the PA for not knowing it's Grand Central Terminal. But the agency should admit that the Hub's most visible public space -- the one beneath the famous, steel-and-glass "wings" designed by architect Santiago Calatrava -- is actually, and absurdly, much bigger than Grand Central's main hall, as the drawing on the right shows.
This, even though the Hub will serve vastly fewer users than Grand Central.
The PA project is obscenely grandiose -- an elephantine edifice that likely can't be built even for its (already way-over-budget) $3.2 billion price tag. It might never be completed at all -- yet the complexities arising from its vast scale bedevil everything around it at Ground Zero.
Recent news articles have predicted the cost could top $4 billion. The PA naturally said that was ridiculous -- but how would it know? It hasn't yet even bid out the job's largest components.
Yet, the PA seems prepared to pay whatever it takes to satisfy Calatrava. Why? Washington is footing some of the bill for the Hub, but not all -- and the feds' dough could be reallocated to other, worthier transit-related projects downtown.
The Hub is an unconscionable waste of precious Ground Zero earth, money and energy. For starters, it's still basically just a new PATH terminal, serving a relative handful of commuters. Again, the drawing helps make the point.
A precise parallel with Grand Central's main hall is impossible, since the two rooms are different shapes. Grand Central is rectilinear while the Hub is ovoid, with a floor that tapers at both ends and walls that taper as they rise to the top.
But their respective dimensions give you the picture. Grand Central's main hall is about 275 feet long, 120 feet wide.
Meanwhile, the Oculus -- the Hub's main public space, officially called the Transit Hall -- is 350 feet long and 145 feet wide at floor level, which is two levels below the street. It tapers to a "mere" 320 feet long by 100 feet wide when it reaches street level.
At its tallest point, the Oculus is 160 feet tall from the floor to the skylight roof. Grand Central is 125 feet high at its apex.
(And the Oculus represents only about half of the Hub -- there's also an endless, subterranean "PATH Hall" to the west of it that New Jersey riders must traverse to reach their trains.)
All that floor space and volume -- for what?
Grand Central's main-hall floor is traversed by 700,000 people a day, Metro North says. Downtown, the temporary PATH station handles 40,000 riders a day.
Of course, the PA insists that many more will use the completed Hub than today's PATH station. The estimate on its Web site is for 200,000 commuters plus 250,000 "pedestrians" daily. Those estimates, even if true, still pale compared with Grand Central's traffic.
And
the PA estimates seem fanciful at best. They assume the Hub will be used by hordes of subway riders making connections from the No. 1 line and from the Fulton Street/Nassau Street station one block east, and shoppers at below-ground stores situated along the sides of the Oculus and the PATH Hall.
Yet the stores seem too awkwardly positioned to draw much of a crowd. They'd make a lot more sense on the otherwise empty, 350-foot long Transit Hall floor -- but try telling that to Calatrava.
And, while 275,000 people a day use the Fulton/Nassau subway station, how likely is it that the Hub will serve as a grand passageway for them? That depends on connecting the Hub to the planned Fulton Street Transit Center -- which is hundreds of millions of dollars over budget and at least six years behind its original scheduled opening.
Indeed, it's hard to see how the all-but-bankrupt MTA can possibly finish the Fulton Street boondoggle. Its recent promise that a planned June 2014 opening is "signed in blood" is ridiculous.
And, even if the Fulton job miraculously is completed, why would subway riders use the underground passageways leading to the Hub except to stay out of the rain?
All in all, the World Trade Center Transportation Hub makes no sense as a transportation hub. Its gargantuan dimensions suggest that the PA regards it as something more -- namely, as the authority's very own 9/11 memorial, one every bit as disproportionate to Ground Zero's size and to its own functional role as is the official, 7-acre memorial itself.
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