BY DUSICA SUE MALESEVIC |The Canal Street station of the 1 train is a gutter, according to a new report.
It’s the filthiest in Lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn, said State Sen. Daniel Squadron, whose office looked at every subway station in his district.
“Looking at the subway stations in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, we found the good, the bad and the downright ugly,” said Squadron at a press conference at the dubious station on Oct. 9.
Over the cacophony of Canal Street, Squadron detailed the seven conditions that his office checked both inside and outside each station — leaking water, graffiti, broken stairs, deteriorating walls, rodents, trash and pooling water.
The Canal Street 1-train station had six of those conditions inside and five outside. The best that could be said of the stop between Varick Street and Sixth Avenue was that its interior stairs weren’t broken, water wasn’t leaking through its exterior walls, and it wasn’t disgorging rats onto the street.
Other Downtown stations did not fare much better. Of the nine worst stations, six were in Lower Manhattan: the R-train station at Rector Street, the Broad Street J and Z station, the A,C,E station at Canal Street, the Franklin Street 1 station and the Wall Street 2,3 station.
Community Board 1 chairwoman Catherine McVay Hughes said the report simply confirmed what many Downtowners already knew — the district has some of the “worst subway stations in the system: deteriorating, dirty and in urgent need of repair and maintenance.”
Squadron, whose 26th district covers Lower Manhattan and parts of waterfront Brooklyn, conducted the study in response to constituent complaints, dispatching a team of 15 interns in the heat of July and August to survey the 53 stations in his constituency.
The results showed that 70 percent of the stations were filled with litter, 68 percent had pooling water, 43 percent had deteriorating walls and 42 percent had graffiti,
Last Friday Squadron and transportation advocates called on the state and city to fully fund the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s capital plan – which at the time faced a funding gap of almost $10 billion.
The next day, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio reached an agreement, with the state pitching in $8.3 billion, and the city $2.5 billion.
The five-year capital will total $26.1 billion and is the largest infrastructure investment in its history, according to the agency.
Nearly half of the stations in Squadron’s district are slated to receive capital improvements under the plan.
