Posted Feb 17, 2010, 2:34 PM
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New Yorker for life
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Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: Borough of Jersey
Posts: 51,869
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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/ny...l?ref=nyregion
Push Begins for 2nd Stop on No. 7 Subway Extension
By CHARLES V. BAGLI
February 16, 2010
Quote:
More than two years ago, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the city concluded that there was enough money for only one new station on the extension of the No. 7 line, at 34th Street and 11th Avenue.
Plans for a second station, at 10th Avenue and 41st Street, were shelved. But now that the tunnel boring machines have chewed through 10 blocks, the real estate industry wants the second station built.
...the Real Estate Board of New York, the powerful lobbying arm of the industry, has turned its attention to the missing link in the No. 7 line. This week it started a Web site (http://www.buildthestation.com/), a petition drive and a lobbying campaign to press the Obama administration to come up with hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for the station.
The second station would be on land at 41st Street and 10th Avenue where Related Companies is erecting a large residential tower. “I’m not slowing my building down for it,” said Related’s chief executive, Stephen M. Ross. “We were told there’s no money around at all. God knows, the M.T.A. doesn’t have any money.”
The other station, at 34th and 11th Avenue, is key to another proposed Related project: a $15 billion development of office towers, residential buildings and parks over the railyards between 30th and 33rd Streets, from 10th to 12th Avenues.
The No. 7 subway line extension has been one long compromise since 2002. Originally, the Bloomberg administration wanted to extend the line from Times Square west and south to 34th Street, before turning east to run into Pennsylvania Station.
But the estimated cost of the two-block-long link to Penn Station, which required drilling underneath existing rail lines, was prohibitive at $1 billion.
The extension was never a priority for the transportation authority, which builds, operates and maintains the city’s subways and commuter rail operations. To avoid a battle with proponents of the long planned Second Avenue subway, the Bloomberg administration offered to pay for the No. 7 line extension.
But by 2006, the administration, in an effort to pare costs, said it would carve out the cavern and platforms for the second station but indefinitely delay building the station. In late 2007, the city and the authority scuttled the station project altogether.
“A 10th Avenue station might sound nice,” said Andrew Brent, a spokesman for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, “but the M.T.A. and state budget problems are well known, and the city is in no position to step in to pay for that, too.”
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