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CB1 Hears Transit Report Downtown residents can look forward to restored R and W train service to the Cortlandt Street station within the year, Metropolitan Transit Authority officials told Community Board 1’s World Trade Center Committee May 12. The future of the benighted Fulton Street transportation hub— aboveground, at least— is less certain. Uday Durg, a construction manager of the MTA, told the committee the Cortland Street R and W station, out of service since Sept. 11, 2001, could be up and running, in both directions, in the next six to eight months. In the meantime, underground work is moving on apace for the nearby Broadway and Fulton Streeet subway station, Durg said. Renovation to the southern entrances to the 2, 3, 4 and 5 lines is complete; construction of the Dey Street concourse, running underground between Broadway and Church Street, is 85 percent complete, with more than 100 workers building the passageway underground. After Drug’s presentation, he faced some difficult questioning by CB1 members. “We heard about the $750 million that was going to be the jewel of Lower Manhattan shrunk and the corridor shrunk, the vaulted glass dome, pretty on paper, was whittled away to a storefront with a cupcake on top,” said Tom Goodkind. “Now that’s been taken away. We just wanted to know since our last meeting has anything come up to restore this jewel of Downtown, probably the pinnacle of downtown rebuilding, to be what we Downtowners expect it to be? Durg protested that any changes to the original transit center designs will be largely cosmetic. “The underground isn’t changing,” he told the committee. “All that’s changing is what the building is going to look like.” What the latest changes to the building will be remains unclear. Durg said the MTA’s internal discussions about the above-ground appearance of the Fulton Street transit hub are still continuing, and wouldn’t go further. But he promised that a new recommendation should be made available to the public within the next three or four weeks. Concerned that the MTA may try to reallocate to other projects some of the federal money that poured in for the reconstruction of Downtown, the committee voted unanimously in favor of a resolution calling on the MTA to use all federal transportation funds originally intended for use Downtown on Downtown projects and not anywhere else in the city.
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