In the days after the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush promised $20 billion in aid to help the city rebuild. A sizable portion of it — $4.5 billion — was devoted to transportation. As then-Senator Hillary Clinton put it: "If you build it and they can get here, they will come."
One of the projects in line for the money: the PATH train station, which was completely destroyed. But officials didn’t want to just rebuild it. They wanted it to be the Grand Central Terminal of downtown. And so in 2004, Gov. George Pataki unveiled a design by renowned architect Santiago Calatrava.
"This is not a station," the governor said. "This is a tribute to those we lost on September 11th and a tremendous symbol of our confidence in the future."
Calatrava likened his structure to a bird taking flight. At first, it was budgeted for $2 billion dollars. Twelve years later, it's nearly $4 billion. The station will serve 50,000 PATH train riders a day. Meanwhile, 300,000 commuters scuttle through the decaying, overcrowded corridors in Penn Station. The outgoing head of the Port Authority, Patrick Foye, says the Calatrava Hub cost too much and does too little.
"Frankly a billion, billion and a half or two could have been taken out of the hub and put into New York Penn Station, or put into the Gateway Tunnel, or put into Terminal A at Newark Airport," he said. "And in my mind that would have been a much more productive and efficient investment."
(To be fair, the Port Authority lengthened and expanded the PATH train platforms. But it can't run longer trains, or even more trains, until the rest of the system is upgraded.)
However, the federal aid money was designated for transportation projects in lower Manhattan. But it turns out that $4.5 billion wasn't enough for a truly transformational transit project, like bringing commuter rail downtown and adding a direct train to JFK airport. And it’s far more than was needed to do a straight rebuild of the PATH station (that cost about $300 million). Like an overfed goldfish outgrowing its bowl, once the feds promised the money, it was going to be spent — mostly on the Calatrava hub.
Here's how it ultimately broke down:
(According to a spokesman for the Federal Transit Administration, "decisions regarding which projects were funded, including their scope, were made locally.")
"It's the same thing we've seen happen on other projects," said Nicole Gelinas, an infrastructure expert with the Manhattan Institute. "The state tends to think this is free money because it comes from Washington. So we end up spending all of Washington’s money — and we end up spending our own."
Meaning: money from taxpayers. And the costs increased so much, the Port Authority had to put down its own money at a time when it has to fund a new Port Authority Bus Terminal, as well as new rail tunnels under the Hudson.
But the hub is visually arresting.
'When you get down inside the terminal and look up," says Tom Wright, the head of the Regional Plan Association, "the sensation you have is total openness."
That opinion was shared by Tristen Anthony, who commutes every day to New Jersey. "It's beautiful, finally we are getting some infrastructure that looks like the rest of the world. Commuting is not fun, but this [place] lifts up your spirit."
And Tom Wright says the hub is more than eye candy. The additional entrances and exits, not to mention the new passageway to multiple subway lines, will get commuters where they want to go faster.
"If you just knock two or three minutes off of the trip for somebody in the morning and the evening," he says, "that’s five minutes a day, that becomes half an hour over the course of a week...It becomes very significant very quickly."
Meanwhile, another train station ALSO heavily damaged in the September 11 attacks is still being rebuilt: three blocks away, the Cortlandt Street subway station on the #1 line won't open until 2018.