BY YANNIC RACK | Swinging a golden pickaxe, the MTA’s chief engineer chipped away at the concrete floor of Grand Central Terminal this week, finally bringing the long-awaited project to open Manhattan’s East Side to Long Islanders above ground.
At a November 10 ceremony on the terminal’s lower-level dining concourse, Dr. Michael Horodniceanu, the head of MTA Capital Construction, symbolically broke ground on a milestone for the East Side Access project, which has been quietly under way for more than a decade.
“East Side Access has been in the works for years, much of it as kind of a stealth project right below our feet,” he said. “Now it will be much more visible to the public.”
By creating a brand new eight-track terminal for the Long Island Rail Road below Grand Central, the project will for the first time allow commuters to travel directly to the East Side rather than force them to travel to the West Side at Penn Station.
“The Long Island Rail Road has long been constrained,” said Patrick Nowakowski, president of the LIRR. “This is a complete game changer.”
The groundbreaking marked the start of construction on one of several access points that will connect the existing terminal to the new concourse, which will include 25,000 square feet of retail space.
Horodniceanu emphasized that customers would be minimally affected by the construction since all businesses will remain open and most of the removed seating has been relocated to other parts of the terminal.
“We are not impacting the customers here. I hope we can continue to be as stealth as possible going forward,” he said. “This will, by no means, change the way Grand Central feels and exists.”
On a recent tour of the caverns and tunnels beneath the station, Horodniceanu showed off the scale of the project which is expected to cost the MTA just over $10 billion.
Once completed over the next seven years, the new concourse will serve 162,000 customers a day, according to the MTA, potentially shortening Long Islanders’ daily commutes by up to 40 minutes.
