The Cortlandt St. N/R station will be closed indefinitely, a representative from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority told Community Board 1 Monday night.
Besides the Cortlandt St. setback, the news Monday was mostly positive regarding progress on the M.T.A.’s Fulton Transit Hub, scheduled to open in mid-2009. New station entrances are opening, the project’s final contract has gone out to bid and the M.T.A. has pledged to exceed certain environmental requirements in its next phase of work.
The opening of the revamped Cortlandt St. N/R station was postponed six months last fall, but now, M.T.A. representative Uday Durg said, it will remain closed for the foreseeable future. The M.T.A.’s work on the station has been complete for months, but the station entrance sits within the Port Authority’s staging area for World Trade Center construction. The M.T.A. and the Port had been working to find a solution, but those efforts have not been successful. Therefore the station will stay closed until the Port is done using the site — 2009 at the earliest, according to Port representative Quentin Brathwaite.
The news at other stations is cheerier. On June 30, a new entrance to the northbound 4/5 platform opened at Maiden Ln. and Broadway. A new southbound entrance is scheduled to open across Broadway by the second week in August. Also by mid-August, four buildings along Broadway should be fully deconstructed.
A Request For Proposals has gone out for the M.T.A.’s last, and largest, contract. The final contract will include the new Fulton Transit Hub building, with an open atrium and retail corridor, as well as the completion of new ramps and underground passageways to connect 12 different subway lines in the area. The exception is the so-called E connector, which will link the Fulton hub to the W.T.C. transit hub. That passageway will now be designed and constructed by the Port Authority.
As a part of the final M.T.A. contract, the agency is requiring that all heavy trucks on the project use both ultra low sulfur diesel and exhaust filters — measures that should reduce the amount of toxic fumes in the neighborhood. That news delighted environmental advocate Catherine McVay Hughes, who chairs C.B. 1’s W.T.C. committee. Hughes has long pushed for cleaner fuel and truck filters. Although a new state law requires many public projects to use the low sulfur diesel, it does not require every truck to have an exhaust filter until 2010.
After some wheedling by Hughes, the Port representatives at the meeting agreed to at least talk to the M.T.A. about their new “above and beyond” environmental standards and to consider using those standards for future Port contracts.
— Skye H. McFarlane
