Posted Mar 29, 2011, 3:48 PM
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New Yorker for life
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Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: Borough of Jersey
Posts: 51,900
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http://tribecatrib.com/news/2011/mar...nter-work.html
Winter Storms Won't Delay Complex Fulton Transit Center
By Matt Dunning
POSTED Mar. 25
Quote:
Despite the punishing conditions that New York City endured this winter, progress on the sprawling Fulton Transit Center, beneath the busy confluence of Broadway, Fulton, Dey, Cortlandt and William Streets, has continued apace and largely on schedule.
In fact, said Uday Durg, the MTA’s chief engineer on the project, the most difficult engineering tasks—such as transferring the weight of a station’s entire track bed without shutting down the subway line—are complete.
“We lost about three weeks total, and we’ll make most of that up working a little later at night and on some Saturdays,” Durg said. “We’ll be able to stay on schedule.”
Later this year, the agency will reopen the southbound R Train platform at Cortlandt Street, as well as the newly excavated, 7,000-square-foot chamber under Church Street connecting it to the northbound platform. Also scheduled to open this year are new entrances at William and Fulton Streets to the 2 and 3 trains, and a temporary connecting tunnel between the A/C and 4/5 platforms. A rehabilitated 4/5 platform, the Dey Street concourse and restored Corbin Building, are all scheduled to open in 2012. The entire project remains due for completion in 2014.
Durg led a Trib reporter and photographer on a tour of the site, which includes a new, column-free tunnel connecting the 4/5, J/Z and 2/3 platforms. The walkway is being carved out of what had been the upper portion of the maze of ramps that formerly connected the platforms. To remove the center columns that served as the tunnel’s backbone, Durg said crews had to drive steel braces down both sides of the structure, and then build a truss on top of the tunnel. Only with the truss in place, he said, could they begin carefully cutting out the center steel beams.
“You have to be very careful doing something like that,” Durg said, glancing at the remaining 12-inch stump of a center column. “One mistake, and you could flood the whole station, or the street above you could cave in.”
At Broadway and Fulton Street, where the center’s main hall is being constructed, crews are installing above-ground columns for the hall, and Durg said they are on schedule to complete the $176-million building’s steel skeleton by the end of the year. Once the building’s signature, 106-feet high oculus is complete, sunlight will filter down to the hall’s lowest concourse.
Elsewhere, along the station’s mezzanine corridors, electronic way-finding banners, flat screen advertising panels and hundreds of thousands of slender, frosted glass tiles are in the process of being installed.
The freshly installed tiles are a hint of what Urg calls the center’s “pristine look,” a look that subway riders are hardly accustomed to. The engineer said he is already wondering what the public will think of it.
“You never really know until you open it,” said Urg, who has been with the project since its inception in 2002. “We like it, though, and we hope the people using the station will like it too.”
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Images taken from the slideshow...
http://www.tribecatrib.com/
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