BY JACKSON CHEN | The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has introduced revised plans to make accessibility improvements to the congested 68th Street — Hunter College stop on the Upper East Side’s Lexington Avenue Subway line.
According to a presentation given to Community Board 8 on April 20, the improvements include installation of a new elevator at the southeast corner of East 68th Street and Lexington Avenue. The new elevator would bring the station into compliance with the American with Disabilities Act (ADA), and will replace an existing flower stand that is a tenant of Hunter College.
Beyond the elevator accommodation for disabled commuters, the upgrades aim to eliminate severe congestion that often creates a long queue for straphangers trying to get to street level from what ranks as the MTA’s second busiest local stop. Access to the universities and medical centers nearby will be enhanced by the creation of a mid-block subway entrance and exit on the east side of Lexington Avenue between East 68th and East 69th Streets. The access point would be on the ground level of the Imperial House building, where storefront space would normally be, according to the MTA.
The agency is in discussions with both Imperial House, which owns the storefront space, and Hunter to determine how to accommodate the new station entrances.
“The museums, the hospitals, and Hunter College are the three jewels that make up the Triple Crown of the Upper East Side neighborhood,” said Jim Clynes, chair of CB8. “And [68th Street] is the subway stop that services those three jewels.”
Noting that 68th Street is one of the neighborhood’s busiest subway stops, Clynes said its narrow stairwells frequently lead to commuter congestion. He added that both CB8 and Hunter College welcome the station improvements.
CB8’s Transportation Committee co-chair Scott Falk echoed that view, saying he has no specific concerns about the project so far. In fact, Falk is glad to see the project moving forward because, following community uproar, a previous improvement plan had been jettisoned and the effort languished for several years.
In October 2011, the MTA presented its first crack at the ADA and congestion improvements at the 68th Street stop, which included two new access points on East 69th Street. Residents rallied against that plan because they felt the installations and extra vehicular and pedestrian traffic would alter the beauty of their block.
Organized as the 69th Street Tenant Association, which was mostly made up of residents of Imperial House — a building of nearly 400 coop apartments — opposition eventually deterred the agency from moving forward. In the wake of the first proposal’s withdrawal, the tenant association developed a working relationship with the MTA to forge a compromise.
“We’ve been in negotiations all this time with the MTA,” said Sid Davidoff, the attorney representing the association. “Over this long period of time, the MTA became very reasonable.”
According to Davidoff, the agency listened to their concerns and eventually came up with the midblock entrance as a solution, despite it being a “long and involved engineering issue.”
The former opposition is content with the plan currently being offered, with no real naysayers at the CB8 meeting or at an MTA public hearing that followed on April 26, Davidoff said.
The MTA is expecting to begin construction of the upgrades in 2017, with an expected completion date in mid-2020.
