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Belated Fulton Street Transit Center to wrap up by 2014
Photo credit: Urbanite
The Fulton Street Transit Center will be five years late and will cost nearly double its original budget, but now the project finally has a deadline that MTA officials Wednesday insisted they can keep.
Work on the $1.4 billion project, which promises to smooth transfers between nine subway lines and provide a new connection to the N, R and W trains, will conclude by 2014, MTA officials announced yesterday.
“What I present today, I stand by,” said Michael Horodniceanu, head of MTA Capital Construction. “I expect you to hold me accountable to it.”
The project, which broke ground in 2004, was originally scheduled to wrap up this year. That deadline was “totally unrealistic,” Horodniceanu said.
A three-story, rectangular glass building featuring 25,000-square-feet of retail space will be built on the street level, above the station. Soaring costs forced the MTA to scale back on a glass dome topping the building.“They over-promised in terms of design,” said William Henderson, executive director of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA. “It was a great big crystal palace thing, and now you basically have a glass box.”
Some service disruptions will take place during the work, mostly on the weekends and evenings, MTA spokesman Kevin Ortiz said. Officials have not determined when the service changes will begin.
Straphangers using the system’s 10th busiest station will also have to maneuver through work sites, particularly during the 40 months of construction on the platform serving the A and C lines. Officials insisted that the work will not cause hazards or dangerous crowding.
Meanwhile, the MTA also decided yesterday to permit the sale of lottery tickets at eight stations. The agency would receive a 3 percent cut from sales.
The six-month pilot, to start later this year, is the first time in decades straphangers will have access to lottery tickets underground. Sales were permitted in the late 1960s but were later banned because of littering and crowding near ticketing locations.
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