http://tribecatrib.com/news/newsoct07/Subway.html
Last Days Of The Lost Station
By Nick Pinto
OCTOBER 1, 2007
Descending into the World Trade Center’s abandoned Cortlandt Street subway station feels like entering a catacomb. The dusty floors are littered with flakes of the paint that peels off the ceiling in thick curls. The drab bricks of the 1960s renovation still line the walls of the station, ending abruptly in a jagged line at the bottom of the stairs to the platform and giving way to concrete where the station shell was rebuilt. Cables and extension cords snake along walls and ceilings, powering work-lamps that throw a harsh fluorescent light over a subway station where no one has caught a train since Sept. 11, 2001.
Nearly everything from the station, which served riders of the 1 and 9 lines, was taken out during the first round of cleaning and debris removal. Even so, some stray reminders of the station’s life remain.
Inside the long-abandoned token booth, two gooseneck microphones stand; a sign in the booth’s cracked Plexiglass window displays the outdated $1.50 subway fare; behind the windows is the white-board that informed travelers, in the hours between when the planes hit and the towers collapsed, that there would be no service at the station that day. In several places on the walls are the spray-painted markings of rescue workers, certifying the station as empty.
As early as this month, these few subterranean remnants of the World Trade Center will be removed, making way for the construction of the new World Trade Center Tower 2 and the underground passageways of the new transportation hub.
Along with them will go the “survivor stairs,” the flight of steps that rises above the station, going nowhere. The north side of the ruin, facing Vesey Street, contains what once served as the subway entrance, now sealed in sheets of heavy plywood. This stairway, which had led to the World Trade Center plaza, provided an escape route for hundreds of workers fleeing the burning towers—and became a cause for preservationists hoping to save them.
The stairs were slated for demolition during recovery operations at the site but the Metropolitan Transit Authority halted their destruction in order to preserve an entry point for rebuilding the 1/9 lines.
Because the station is considered historically significant under the National Historical Preservation Act, the Metropolitan Transit Authority has agreed to preserve some of the spray painted sections of wall before the remains of the station are demolished to make way for the construction of the new Tower 2. The agency held public hearings and consulted a wide range of interested parties, including preservation advocates, before deciding which elements of the station to preserve for display in museums.
The remnants of the station, along with the survivor stairs, will be removed this month or next and temporarily stored with other artifacts and detritus from the site at Hangar 17 at Kennedy Airport.
“There are a lot of legal technicalities to this process, and with different agencies in charge of different parts of the site, the process has been very complicated,” said Derek Piper, a Transit Authority analyst working on preservation of the station remnants. “It’s touch-and-go when the removal work will actually take place. It could happen anywhere from two weeks to two months from now.”
While the stair treads are slated to be incorporated into the memorial’s visitor center and museum, the station relics will find their way to other museums. The New York State Museum in Albany wants to display them, as do the New York City Transit Museum and the World Trade Center Memorial. Pieces may be lent out for exhibits.
“When you go down there, it evokes the events of that day,” said Ken Lustbader, spokesman for the Lower Manhattan Emergency Preservation Fund, which lobbied to preserve elements of the WTC site. “These pieces are a historic resource by the mere fact that they were at the site. Preserving them will give people a sense of the immediacy and authenticity of the World Trade Center and what happened to it.”
What happened to the station was dramatic, as pictures taken days after Sept. 11 show. In the center of the station, the tunnel gave way entirely, filling with earth, girders, pipes, wiring, and concrete slabs from the buildings above. In areas that did not collapse, the broad red steel pillars supporting the roof above the platform buckled and warped under the weight of the impact.
In the months after the attack, the tracks were cleared and the concrete “station envelope” rapidly rebuilt, allowing the 1 Train to once again run to South Ferry just a year after it was interrupted, but the Cortlandt Street station itself was stripped, sealed and abandoned.
In the empty station today, the trains can be heard hurtling by behind the metal sheets that separate the tracks from the deserted platform. As riders fly by, all they see of a station that once served the World Trade Center is a glimpse of the original brick through chinks in the steel screens. Soon even this will be gone.
Prev
__
__
Linear Mode
