Officials from the Port Authority and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority opened the world’s most expensive train station on May 26 by tearing off its plain brown wrapper.
BY YANNIC RACK
Seven years after it was supposed to be completed, and three months after its alleged “opening,” the WTC Transit Hub finally lived up to its name last week by opening its connection to the subway system.
Backtracking on plans to avoid an ostentatious celebration, Port Authority executive director Patrick Foye and other bigwigs showed up on May 26 to crow about the completion at an event ostensibly staged to praise the construction workers rather than the agency’s top brass.
After a ceremony inside the $4 billion Oculus — the spiky, white structure that has been compared to a dinosaur skeleton — Port Authority officials and architect Santiago Calatrava officially opened the underground corridor from the hub’s PATH station to the nearby Fulton Center and the 11 subway lines that converge there.
Last week’s ceremony was billed as a thank-you to the union workers who spent the past decade building the epic edifice.
Listening to a soaring rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the speeches appreciating the long-laboring union workers, the embarrassing history of the project might easily have been forgotten — at least until Port Authority chairman John Degnan decided to try and justify the decade-long debacle.
“Expensive? Yes. Controversial? Perhaps. But hasn’t that been true in the history of art always?” he said. “I think so.”
The same could easily be said of mere infrastructure, of course, but Degnan insisted on elevating the eventual completion of the transportation hub to a test of our very civilization.
“As John F. Kennedy said, ‘The life of the arts — far from being an interruption, a distraction, in the life of the nation — is very close to the center of a nation’s purpose, and is a test to the quality of a nation’s civilization,’” Degnan recited, as if the Oculus were the Acropolis rather than a train station.
Later in his speech, Degnan did eventually deign to acknowledge that the hub was basically an infrastructure project, with a conveniently edited quote likening it to massive Hoover Dam (then known as the Boulder Dam).
“In closing, I think the words of President Franklin Roosevelt, when he dedicated the Boulder Dam, apply here: ‘All these dimensions are superlative. They represent and embody the accumulated engineering knowledge and experience of centuries; and when we behold them it is fitting that we pay tribute to the genius of their designers … but especially, we express our gratitude to the thousands of workers who gave brain and brawn to this great work of construction.’”
What Degnan left out of that Roosevelt quote would have reflected on the Oculus in a less flattering light.
“We recognize also the energy, resourcefulness and zeal of the builders, who, under the greatest physical obstacles,” Roosevelt said in his original speech, “have pushed this work forward to completion two years in advance of the contract requirements.”
Next up, Degnan’s deputy Scott Rechler thought it would be a good idea to bash the builders of the Brooklyn Bridge, who took four years longer to build what was then the longest suspension bridge in the world than it took the Port Authority to build what is now the most expensive train station in history.
“The chairman noted that this project was considered expensive and controversial,” Rechler said. “You know, coincidentally, this past May was the 133rd anniversary of the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge, another controversial and expensive project that took 14 years to build.”
But Rechler could also have mentioned some other grand projects that were completed in less time than the decade it took to build the Oculus.
The Empire State Building was famously topped off in just one year and 45 days. It took the Port Authority itself only seven years to build both of the original Twin Towers. The Statue of Liberty was completed in nine years — which included hauling the parts across the Atlantic Ocean on a steamship.
And after another of President Kennedy’s stirring speeches, it took us only eight years to put a man on the moon.
Although he didn’t speak at the event, even Port Authority executive director Patrick Foye shared the stage with his colleagues on Thursday — despite the fact that he said earlier this year that he would pass on any opening ceremonies because he considered the project “a symbol of excess.”
What followed was a fitting end to the whole saga. There was no ribbon cutting, or anything resembling the grand groundbreaking ten years ago, when Calatrava’s daughter symbolically released two white doves into the air.
Instead, the transit officials huddled around the wall separating the Oculus from a tunnel to the subway, and awkwardly tore off the brown paper wrapping covering the glass doors with a poster marked, “Not an exit.”
The Port Authority bigwigs were dwarfed by the vast, $4-billion structure they had gathered to celebrate.
