By Philip Newman
As the one-year anniversary of the World Trade Center attack nears, officials have proposed a major Lower Manhattan transportation center made possible by $4.55 billion in previously unavailable federal funds.
The complex, to be finished possibly as early as 2005, would provide a third major transit center after Grand Central and Penn Station, linking subway, train, buses and ferries and a more than half-mile-long concourse.
The project would also provide a $250 million study of the possibility of providing access for Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North commuter trains to Manhattan’s southern tip. Tom Kelly, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said was aware of no plans to extend the proposed Second Avenue subway into the complex.
Much of the money comes from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which was originally restricted to restoring parts of Lower Manhattan destroyed by the attack of Sept. 11. Normally, FEMA money can be used only for restoration, not new construction.
The funds are part of the $21.4 billion the federal government had promised to New York City for recovery from the attack.
Gov. George Pataki said “our vision of Lower Manhattan will not be exactly the same as on the morning of Sept. 11.
“It will be a stronger community,” Pataki told those at a ceremony Monday on Liberty Street at the edge of the crater-like remains of the World Trade Center.
The new transportation center would link a new PATH railroad station to 14 subway lines and ferry stations.
It would also include:
An underground concourse stretching nearly 3,000 feet from the World Financial Center to the Fulton Street subway complex.
A bus terminal near the former World Trade Center site.
Reconstruction and rehabilitation of the South Ferry subway station with links for ferry terminals from New Jersey, Staten Island, Queens and Brooklyn.
Improved links for nine subway lines at what is to be known as the Fulton Transit Center.
Since the cost of clearing rubble of the World Trade Center came in at $5 billion under estimates, U.S. Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y. ) and Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) lobbied the Bush administration make the remaining FEMA funds available for the new construction.
Reach contributing writer Philip Newman by e-mail at Timesledgr@aol.com or call 229-0300, Ext. 136.
