Lower Manhattan’s Fulton Center subway hub and its high-tech “oculus,” conceived in the wake of September 11 and opened in 2014, won numerous awards. Applauding critics were less loquacious about the construction itself: The project ran seven years late, paralyzing a downtown retail district; it was budgeted for $750 million but cost $1.4 billion; and, as the budget exploded, crucial features, such as a sufficient number of functional down escalators, were omitted, while the labyrinthine subway-line connections remained almost untouched.
As the New York Post’s Steve Cuozzo observed, the $7 billion combined cost of the Fulton Center, the soon-to-open Santiago Calatrava Ground Zero PATH station, and the proposed Moynihan Amtrak station (none of which adds mass-transit capacity) would have been enough to build a new Hudson River rail tunnel and make repairs to century-old tunnels that have dangerously deteriorated.
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