Biggest NY subway hub opens; expects 300,000 commuters daily

, Nov 10: New York's biggest subway hub has opened in lower Manhattan a vital link between the new World Trade Center and the rest of the city.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority inaugurated the USD 1.4 billion Fulton Center, a transit complex where many subway lines converge.

"Welcome to the station of the 21st century," engineer Michael Horodniceanu, president of MTA's Capital Construction who led the work, told a gathering of transit and political officials yesterday.

Officials said the transit and retail hub will serve as Lower Manhattan's next great public space encased in a glass-and-steel shell with a soaring, light-filled atrium.

The federal government funded 90 percent and New York state the rest of the project, which includes 180,000 square feet (16,700 square meters) of new retail and office space, plus five old stations that were refurbished and linked.

The center will accommodate up to 300,000 daily riders using nine subway lines. A 350-foot (105-meter) tunnel was built leading to the World Trade Center's Santiago Calatrava-designed transit facility and the PATH commuter train to New Jersey.

That tunnel will open sometime next year. After a decade of work following the destruction of the World Trade Center area and flooding from Superstorm Sandy in 2012, "we made it," Horodniceanu said.

PTI