Easy Riders

New Downtown Hub Will Ease Burden On Commuters

The Fulton Street Transit Center will improve subway line access for 300,000 commuters each day, incorporating six existing subway stations and providing direct access to PATH service.

 “Almost 14 subway lines come through Fulton Street and the Lower Manhattan area,” says Mysore Nagaraja, president of the MTA Capital Construction Co., the construction arm of the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority. “They were built at the turn of the last century by three different companies who were competing with each other. The connectivity between the lines was not their interest. Now people have to transfer, and it is quite a task. They have to go up a ramp and down, all kinds of things.

“To find the entrance is a huge issue. You have to really look. We will connect all the lines from west to east underground in a rational way so people can transfer [more easily].”

The station job came to life after the federal government allocated $4.5 billion for transportation improvements to revitalize Lower Manhattan after Sept. 11. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority submitted a proposal for the Fulton Street Station and received $847 million.

“The major challenge for this project is the last contract in procurement,” Nagaraja says. “The market conditions today are different than when we started this project, so I’m hoping we get a reasonable price. This is 100% financed from the federal government. My goal is to keep the project within that budget.”

The station

The MTA hired Arup of New York in association with Grimshaw, HDR Daniel Frankfurt and Page Ayres Cowley Associates, all of New York, to develop designs for the transit hub. The design team organized the 366,000-sq-ft transit center around a civic space with an atrium, topped by a glass oculus. Natural daylight will help illuminate the facility. A 50-ft-tall glazed entrance pavilion surrounds the atrium and maintains an urban street wall, with retail space on Fulton Street and Broadway.

“It’s going to be elegant,” says Bob Harvey, acting executive director of the Lower Manhattan Construction Command Center. “This will be a beautiful edifice that will help people in to find their appropriate subway line.”

The design incorporates the historic Corbin Building on the corner of Broadway and John Street. The project includes underpinning and rehabbing of the nine-story, brick, stone and terra cotta structure, built in 1888 as a bank and offices for Long Island Rail Road chief Austin Corbin. The building will serve as an entrance to the transit center and Dey Street concourse.

Underground work

Skanska USA Civil Northeast of Whitestone, N.Y., began a $133 million design-build project in July 2005, to construct the 400-ft-long, 29-ft-wide Dey Street pedestrian passageway, which will link the Fulton Street center with the World Trade Center PATH station. Work takes place underground to depths of 45 ft.

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“It’s an impressive structure below Dey Street,” Harvey says. “The excavation, work and cut-and-cover mining they are doing rivals large projects that take place in other parts of the country and world, but you don’t see it from the street level.”

The project entails structural underpinning to protect subway lines, stations and nearby buildings; relocating utility lines; excavating 40,000 cu yds of dirt; and pouring of the new concrete concourse structure. The company installed 32,000 sq ft of temporary decking, supported by piles, on Dey Street to maintain traffic.

Skanska divided the project into four general work segments: the R/W subway line underpass, the Dey Street concourse structure, the Dey Street entrance pavilion and the 4/5 subway line underpass.

A vault structure at 195 Broadway and a “bathtub” have been completed. The excavation required digging 20 ft below the water table. Skanska used secant piles and grout walls to form the walls. For the secant, crews drilled hollow cylinders up to 80 ft and filled them with concrete while withdrawing the casing. A second set of piles was placed and filled with concrete in between the first ones.

“You end up with a concrete wall made out of piles,” says Norm Hirsch, project manager for Skanska. “We did more than 300 of those to create the bathtub.”

The concourse runs under the R/W subway line and the 4/5 subway line. Rebuilding work around the lines took place on weekends and has been completed. Crews installed 150 ft of continuous footings along both sides of the 4/5 line. It also placed jet grout columns.

“It’s a soil mix,” Hirsch says. “You go in with a high-pressure nozzle. It eats up the dirt and mixes it with a slurry. Once you drill all the way down, you insert grout and displace the slurry, and you end up with 6-ft-diameter grout column. You do every other one and then go back and fill in between. You end up with a wall of grout. That’s what we did under each end of the two subways.”

About 100 people are working underground on the project. The job will require installation of more than 1,100 tons of structural steel, 900 tons of rebar and 12,000 cu yds of concrete.

Skanska expects to complete the project, now increased with change orders to $150 million, in November.

Related projects

Citnalta Construction of Bohemia, N.Y, has substantially completed the rehabilitation of the No. 2/3 station on Fulton Street.The $32 million project included construction of two additional entrances at the south end of Broadway for the 4/5 subway lines.

Gramercy Group of Westbury, N.Y., finished a $7.5 million demolition of several buildings between Fulton and John streets that the MTA had purchased to make way for the station. 

Throughout all the work, the Lower Manhattan Construction Command Center ensures the people involved with the various projects in the area are talking with each other and coordinating deliveries and removal of materials to make sure everything is built as efficiently as possible.

“We get the construction schedules for all of the projects and roll them together,”

Harvey says. “We look for bottlenecks and coordinate between the parties and discuss with them when certain projects take priority over others.”

The Fulton Street Transit Center is scheduled for a fall 2009 opening.

Useful sources:
Lower Manhattan Construction Command Center
http://www.lowermanhattan.info

Grimshaw
http://www.grimshaw-architects.com

Metropolitan Transportation Authority-Fulton Street
http://www.mta.info/capconstr/fstc/

Team Box:
Owner: Metropolitan Transportation Authority, New York
Design Team: Arup, Grimshaw, HDR Daniel Frankfurt and Page Ayres Cowley Associates, all of New York
Design-Build Dey Street Corridor: Skanska USA Civil Northeast, Whitestone, N.Y.