Reply With QuoteYes and like someone once said, just like rats.Originally Posted by ablarc
Penn Station opens up to 8th and 33rd.
What's so exciting there?
A Duane Reade.
Yes, I see it now.
its a subway entrance not the gateway to the country or a iconic entrance to new york its just fulton street
Yes and like someone once said, just like rats.
Penn Station opens up to 8th and 33rd.
What's so exciting there?
A Duane Reade.
Yes, I see it now.
Physical location doesn't really matter. It's the function of the building that counts: as the gateway to New York for untold millions over the years, Penn Station was the first thing people saw when they came here. As a great world city, it was only fitting that New York had a grand entrance point.
These days, train travel, at least in this country, is almost as strongly avoided as Greyhound. So perhaps the current Penn Station is an appropriate solution; I mean, come on, it does look a lot like the Port Authority basement.
So what does all of this mean? It means we should put all our marbles into that new 4th airport. Make it a grand gateway for New York, a Penn Station for the 21st century. Have it handle those really big flights, packed with tons of tourists and international visitors. Meanwhile, our existing airports can handle the daily business flights whose passengers can't afford to waste time travelling to Manhattan from somewhere out in upstate New York. Oh yeah, that's just more proof that physical location doesn't matter.
Let's be careful here. Progressivism, as a philosophy, has a lot more to do with politics and social problems than anything else. Generally speaking, it's the idea that as society changes, we need to change our laws and codes of conduct accordingly. A prime example was the women's suffrage movement.
New York City is still heavily left-wing, which is the cradle of progressivism. No surprise that it's a haven for socially and politically progressive ideas such as gay rights, the right to choose, as well as things such as no indoor smoking, banning of trans fats in restaurants, and opposition against Wal-Mart.
A subsector of progressivism that New York hasn't been doing so well at, ever since Robert Moses, is that of limiting government bureaucracy and inefficiencies in various approval processes. But with people like Doctoroff and Gargano taking over (or at least trying to) many projects to push them through final approvals and towards construction, I think we're heading in the right direction.
November 30, 2006
Walkway Between Subways Is Promised for Transit Hub
By WILLIAM NEUMAN
An underground walkway connecting the R and W subway lines to the E line in Lower Manhattan will be built along with a new downtown subway hub, the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority said yesterday. But it was not clear what would be cut from the station project to free up the $15 million needed for the connector.
The authority’s chairman, Peter S. Kalikow, revived the half-block connector between the E line and the two other lines two days after members of the agency’s board complained that it was being left out of plans for the Fulton Street Transit Center, which includes an architecturally ambitious glass building with a conical roof.
The center, which will streamline connections among about a dozen subway lines, has a budget of $884 million, and officials have said that to allow for the connector, $15 million will have to be cut from another part of the project. Board members said on Monday that they did not want “a fancy building and a fancy roof” at the expense of riders’ convenience.
Mysore Nagaraja, the authority’s president of capital construction, said he was working on identifying cuts that would make the connector possible.
Mr. Kalikow spoke yesterday at a meeting of the authority’s board, at which officials announced that a tax windfall from the sale of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village would help pay for new paint jobs in 200 subway stations.
The $52 million needed to paint the stations will come from a total of $81.6 million that the transportation authority will receive in mortgage and transfer taxes from the sale, which totaled nearly $5.4 billion. The authority receives a percentage of the transfer and mortgage taxes collected on real estate sales in New York City, and the taxes have become an important part of the agency’s financing.
Real estate tax revenues that were higher than expected and growing ridership will contribute to a budget surplus of $938 million for the transportation authority this year, according to new estimates. Next year, the agency expects to run a surplus of $272 million, which will eliminate the need for a fare and toll increase.
The authority had previously said it would increase fares and tolls by 5 percent every two years, but yesterday officials also eliminated an increase that had been planned for 2009 from their financial projections. Mr. Kalikow said that was done to give a clearer picture of the agency’s financial needs.
Its needs are severe because of escalating interest payments on billions of dollars in debt the authority has taken on in recent years to buy new buses and rail cars and to finance major projects like a link between the Long Island Rail Road and Grand Central Terminal. The new projections show operating deficits of $805 million in 2008, $1.46 billion in 2009 and $1.79 billion in 2010.
But the authority’s projections have been wrong before. As recently as February 2005, the agency said it expected to run a budget deficit of $607 million this year. If the latest predictions for this year prove correct, the authority’s planners will have been off by about $1.5 billion.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
I really dont know what you're getting at at? sounds like a half assed response to me. Are you saying a great train station shouldnt be built because a duane reade is outside? i can see it now, a new zoning law, "no good architecture within a 100m radius of a duane reade". are you saying grand central is boring because it has a duane reade in and around it? Perhaps the penn station area is so crap because there is nothing like the old penn station to keep the area of a higher standard? Get back to me with an intelligent response.
Getting back to the thread, i really dont see how you justify a expense element like the dome for people going from the A train to the 4? its just not needed in a subway, spend that money improving the subway system as a whole or even the stations before you build a glass dome
Well, you could extend that rationale to all buildings.
Why should I care what the Goldman Sachs tower looks like? I don't work there, and its purpose is to provide work space so people can have jobs and the company and its investors can make a profit.
When the PATH station was presented, either Pataki or Bloomberg observed that we don't create grand public spaces anymore. I wouldn't want subway improvements to be sacrificed at the expense of this building, but you have to view the situation in relationship to the MTA.
It's a bloated agency that still hasn't fixed the internal problems that were pointed out years ago. It maintains a huge legal staff while contracting out much of the work to private firms.
It's has a history of misstating budget projections. As noted in the article:
Projection #1: $607 million deficit
Projection #2: $938 million surplus
The dome's a furbelow, and it keeps you from building on top of the glass box.
So deep-six the dome, reduce the glass box to get it under budget, provide all required links, and let a developer plop a building down on top.
That way the MTA can realize some revenue.
not really, the subway is functional transportation system not a building, people will be in subway entrances for extremely short periods of time and most people wouldnt care if it was a simple staircase or a big dome they would use it regardless. the path station is different because it is a major destination at the world trade centre so a grand space can be warranted but a large subway interchange doesnt, does anyone think times square station requires a grand entrance?
You really cant compare a subway entrance to a massive office building, obviously the building has to be designed to cater for light and workers health and moral while hopefully creating a signature design which makes it attractive to the outside world, worlds apart from a subway entrance.
You reply was replying to something no-one has said, why should you care? you shouldnt, the building has no affect on your life but who cares about that. i never said anything about how i care how the fulton centre looks, i was talking about whether or not this entrance is really required at all.
My statement, why should I care, was not a reply to anything. It was a sarcastic remark about how we regard the cityscape.
That cityscape includes all buildings, be they corporate towers, residential buildings, or transit hubs.
then thats a different topic
Why?
this thread is about the transit centre not the extremely broad subject of cityscape
You can check many other threads in this forum on a variety of projects. They always include discussions of their street presence. In fact, that aspect usually produces the most lively debates.
This seems like a logical way to go ...
Is it too late for the MTA to make such a change in direction?
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