NY Times
New Subway Entrance Opens Window to an Old, Coal-Heated New York
Michael Appleton for The New York Times
Contractors work at night at Eighth Avenue and 42nd Street. Vaults used for storing coal were under the roadway, a relic of a time when streets were narrower.
By CHARLES DELAFUENTE
Published: November 28, 2008
In the heart of Midtown, a yearlong project to build a new subway entrance provides a nightly feast for sidewalk superintendents and urban archaeologists.
Richard Perry/The New York Times
Work continues by day. “You end up with a maze of things that you have to maneuver through,” a construction official said.
During the day, at least on weekdays, much of the underground work at Eighth Avenue and 42nd Street is hidden by steel plates weighing more than two tons each.
They are removed about 10 p.m., when there is less traffic, exposing a cornucopia of dirt-encrusted pipes and ducts, the very arteries and veins of the city. And the surgeons in hard hats have to move the biggest of them — the aorta, if you will — without nicking the others.
The new entrance, on the southeast corner of the intersection, is part of 11 Times Square, an office building owned by SJP Properties, going up from 41st to 42nd Street. Part of the project is moving utilities, said Matthew DiGiorgi, senior project manager of the builder, Plaza Construction. “First and foremost was relocating a 48-inch-diameter sewer main,” he said.
Plaza, a major New York construction company, is not normally in the sewer-pipe business. It is in charge of this work because creating the subway entrance was part of the deal on the property, Mr. DiGiorgi said.
On its face, the task “doesn’t appear to be that complex,” said Richard Wood, Plaza’s president, but it is always complicated to make changes under “a street that’s accumulated 100 years of infrastructure at different times, and not very properly documented.” He added: “You end up with a maze of things that you have to maneuver through.”
The work — which Mr. DiGiorgi said included digging pits as deep as 23 feet to lay the new pipe, 40 feet south of the old one — has attracted a lot of gapers at one of Manhattan’s busiest intersections.
It has also yielded a few surprises.
One of them involved the buildings that once stood on the site. They were built about a century ago and had basement vaults, extending to the curb line, that were used for storing coal. The vaults do not appear on underground maps, the way utility lines do.
When the old buildings were demolished years ago and the land was turned into a parking lot, there was no need to remove the subterranean vaults, which were not in anyone’s way. Now they are.
Giving an underground tour one recent cold night, Martin Giroux, Plaza’s project manager at the site, pointed out another complication. At the time the old buildings were built, the sidewalk on 42nd Street was wider and the streets were narrower. With the current narrower sidewalks, the vaults now lie not just under them but under the roadway. To brace the steel plates over 42nd Street, workers installed a 21-inch-thick beam.
It is possible, even during the day, to see the remains of the brick-and-concrete arches of the old vaults, and part of the 120-foot-long new pipe, from the part of the excavation that is left uncovered: a pit behind a fence near a temporary covered pedestrian walkway.
They are much more visible, as Mr. Giroux pointed out, from the unfinished subbasement of 11 Times Square.
The vaults had to be drilled out and removed largely by hand, because of the tangle of lines for telephone, electricity, water and fiber-optic connections — not to mention steam pipes — running under the street at varying depths. If workers had put a backhoe in there instead of working by hand, and “hit one of those lines, it’s a catastrophe,” Mr. Giroux said.
As sections of the old pipe were unearthed, they revealed the site’s history. The pipe appears to have been changed somewhat in the 1960s, Mr. Giroux said, but he estimated that its old base dates to the 1860s or 1870s.
Mr. Giroux marveled at the cooperation the project had engendered. A transplanted Midwesterner, he said that he had heard horror stories about trying to work with transit officials and workers, but that he had not encountered any.
Work on the new subway entrance started in May and was expected to be completed in a year.
When the new pipe is done, it will be covered with sand and concrete and the street will be filled in and paved. . The scars will heal, and the city will have another skyscraper with a convenient subway connection.
Asked what other projects of his had changed the city’s skyline, Mr. Wood diplomatically said that “every building is important to us.” But then he cited Riverhouse, at Battery Park City; 147 Flatbush Avenue Extension in Downtown Brooklyn (“a beautiful building”); and the “very visible” Random House building at Broadway and 56th Street. His clear implication was that 11 Times Square, with its escalators from the lobby to the subway below, would rank with them.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company