With hundreds of millions of federal stimulus dollars now firmly in hand, officials for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority have set 2014 as the projected completion date of the $1.4 billion Fulton Street Transit Center.

Parts of the project, however, will be open to the public as early as December of this year, an MTA official told Community Board 1 at a June 8 meeting.

The entire project, which will connect 12 subway lines and the PATH trains and include more than 25,000 square feet of retail space, was to have been completed in 2007, seven earlier than now promised.

“We’re back on track,” said Michael Horodniceanu, president of the MTA’s Captial Construction division. “By the time we’re done, you’re going to have one of the most elegant stations in the system.”

The MTA first announced its new schedule for the station’s completion at one of its committee meetings held late last month.

Often described as “the Grand Central Station of Lower Manhattan,” the new transit center will be partially funded by $424 million in federal stimulus money the agency secured earlier this year for its construction projects.

Speaking before Community Board 1’s World Trade Center Redevelopment Committee on June 8, Horodniceanu said most of the planned improvements to the station would be finished by the end of 2012.

“This is by no means one project,” he said. “What you’re going to see is a progressive roll-out of customer benefits as we go along. The important part is that we’ve reached a consensus on cost and schedule.”

Two pieces of the massive station reconstruction are already finished. The agency unveiled an improved 2/3 platform in 2006, and a new entrance to the 4/5 Train on the east side of Broadway at Maiden Lane in 2007. Horodniceanu said he expected the northbound platform of the Cortlandt Street R/W station—closed in 2005 due to construction on the World Trade Center site—to reopen in December 2009.

More improvements to the station, including a new William Street entrance and easier connection between the A/C and 4/5 Trains, would be complete in 2011, Horodniceanu said. The new Dey Street entrance and concourse that will eventually connect the station to the World Trade Center Transportation Hub, as well as a rehabilitated 4/5 platform would be done 2012.

Also included in the project is the multi-million-dollar restoration of the brick and terra cotta Corbin building, next door. The slender, nine-story landmark building will be integrated into the transit center with escalators leading up from the main concourse through restored archways and onto the street. That work, according to Horodniceanu, will be complete in 2013.

The new transit center is designed to, piece by piece, replace the labyrinth of ramps and stairways that make up the current Fulton Street station. A balcony of retail stores will encircle the main concourse of the new station, one level below the street at Broadway and Fulton, with direct access to the 4/5 Train platforms. The A/C platforms and the Dey Street concourse will be on the level below. The main concourse will be housed in a four-story, glass-and-steel “head house” topped with an angled, cone-shaped dome to allow natural light to reach even the lowest levels of the complex.

“This is just terrific,” said committee chairwoman Catherine McVay Hughes after seeing photos of the excavated site of the new head house, obscured from pedestrian view by a plywood barrier. The site had been home to a swath of retail and commercial tenants before it was razed in 2007.

“I walk by the site every day, and it’s great to see what’s on the other side of the wall,” McVay Hughes said. “It’s just incredible how much has been excavated.”

William Wheeler, the MTA’s Director of Planning, said it would likely be at least another three years before the agency begins awarding leases to retail tenants. Though he would not name any names, Wheeler said there are a handful of retail suitors that have expressed interest.

Last year, MTA officials announced that the cost of building the transit center had almost doubled—from $755 million to $1.4 billion—since the project was first designed. For months, the agency maintained that cost overruns would force it to drastically simplify the above-ground head house in order to keep the project moving. Horodniceanu said that with the $424 in stimulus money—a little less than 40 percent of the $1.1 billion grant that the agency received from the federal government—he was "90 percent sure" the head house and oculus could be built within the agency’s budget and on schedule.

“We expect to be very aggressive, and we will be very conscious that this is an important project,” he said, adding that completing the entire transit center on time and without going over budget would be his "legacy."

 

"I will ensure that this is going to happen," Horodniceanu said. "You can hold me accountable.”

The remainder of the station’s reconstruction will be paid for using approximately $847 million in federal post-Sept. 11 development funding and $129 million of the MTA’s own money.