Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Hub snub

The complex that could have been like a downtown Grand Central Terminal just got a lot less grand.

MTA shatters Fulton Street dome plan

The glass dome building set to gloriously top the Fulton Street Transit Center might be replaced with merely a street-level plaza because of booming construction costs, the MTA said Monday.

Running more than $400 million over budget, the long-awaited transit hub -- that a full side of a city block was cleared to make way for -- will now open in 2010 instead of 2009, without the dome that could have become a city icon. The MTA had already scaled back the size of the hub after delays and cost overruns.


MTA'S $900M BOONDOGGLE

Is it me or does that thing look like a glass egg surrounded by a scaffold?

Photo from NY Post

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yep, that's the way of the MTA: Always lying to customers and having grand, cost-overruning plans that never get's realized. And they wanted a fare hike?

Anonymous said...

This is a disgrace... at this point, I have a feeling that the MTA is going to abandon/cut down many other large-scale projects, such as the 2nd Avenue Subway. You just can't trust the MTA. The executives of the MTA are all a bunch of greedy, indifferent, smartasses.

Anonymous said...

And it looks like they evicted all those buinesses from Broadway and Fulton for nothing.

You don't need a fancy-shmancy dome there, never did, and neither do you need the proposed $2 billion Calatrava PATH station a block away that resembles a fish skeleton in the renderings.

What you do need is a way to run vital links like the #7 train on weekends, find a way to avoid the massive weekend reroutings on all other lines, and express service for night workers. Spend some money on that, instead of shiny stuff.

www.forgotten-ny.com

Anonymous said...

Welcome to the city where nothing grand gets built anymore, unless it's privately financed crap.

This project is in the heart of the Financial District, so why aren't the local corporations pitching in to help?

Remember how quickly the state completed the city's tallest skyscraper? Remember how quickly the first subway was completed? All a distant memory.

Anonymous said...

Yuck, yuck, yuck......
the best laid plans of Marty Markowitz
for downtown Brooklyn's renaissance
seem to have gotten f----d up by the MTA !

Welcome to "Queens World" Marty .......
where dreams get shattered daily!

Now you go and grab a quick snort
and some lunch at Gage & Tolner
to mull it over.

What's that.....
you say they closed a while back?

Another bad blow for your borough!

Anonymous said...

Can someone say "butt-plug"?

Anonymous said...

I don't know for sure, but I'll bet there's a "project labor agreement" on this job which is a one-way ticket to higher costs, on top of the usual ridiculous public works expenses.