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What to build at the World Trade Center site now—an illustrated proposal
A Way Out of the Pit?
- The build-it-and-they-will-come mindset underlying the current plans for the World Trade Center needs to be reversed. Here’s how.
Proposal by Stephen Davis
[Full text of article:]
Text box accompanying first illustration (regional rail map):
Next Stop, World Trade Center?
A mere six miles of tunnels (indicated in black on maps) is all that’s required to provide a one-seat ride to lower Manhattan for millions in the greater New York region, from the western border of New Jersey to the easternmost tip of Long Island, a span of nearly 200 miles.
Text box accompanying second illustration (transit map, bird’s eye view from upper New York harbor):
The Six Mile Plan
Depicted below and on the following pages is the Six Mile Plan, an unauthorized proposal to revitalize downtown Manhattan by building a passenger railroad tunnel under the Hudson and East rivers. The tunnel, shown in black, would connect NJ Transit’s Hoboken terminal with Long Island Rail Road’s Flatbush Avenue terminal less than six miles away. Midway between the two existing terminals, at the World Trade Center site, a new train station would be constructed underground, mostly within the so-called bathtub. The Six Mile Plan would create one-seat train service to downtown Manhattan from all but a handful of the existing stations served by NJ Transit and Long Island Rail Road, as well as points along Amtrak’s northeast corridor line such as Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. For regular long-distance commuters to downtown Manhattan (who currently use a combination of suburban trains and subways to get to work), the six-mile tunnel and the WTC train station would shave five to 15 minutes off each one-way trip. Over the course of a 30-year commuting career, this amounts to between 50 and 150 days’ less time spent traveling back and forth to work. Based on publicly disclosed figures for other New York regional infrastructure projects, the Six Mile Plan, including the bi-level underground train station illustrated on the following page, could be built for $6–9 billion. A World Trade Center memorial complete with park and sunken tower footprints would fit on top of the proposed new infrastructure .
Main article (illustrated with schematic drawing of proposed WTC underground train station):
Why a memorial should be the last thing built at the World Trade Center site
In recent months, after some five years of battling over various visions and plan details, the World Trade Center site debate has shifted decisively to questions of finance. Will there be enough money to build the memorial? The ad hoc fund-raising group halted operations last May following reports that the projected cost had soared to nearly $1 billion. Will the planned 9/11 museum be forced to charge admission? This is now considered a near certainty, given the unlikelihood of a perpetual government subsidy. Has sufficient financing been lined up to complete the project’s 1,776-foot signature skyscraper? New York’s governor contends the office tower is a white elephant in the making, destined for bankruptcy.
As difficult as the long journey to reach the construction stage has been, there’s a certain poetic justice in the notion that the final leg, too, will be a strain. That’s because getting to the World Trade Center site is a well-known schlep for most people who live in the New York metropolitan area. In fact, the twin problems the developers face—funding the site’s redevelopment and transporting people to the site itself—are closely connected.
How hard is it for New York area residents to get to the World Trade Center site? Consider, for comparison, the typical journeys made by over a million rail riders daily into midtown Manhattan (regarded by many locals and commercial real estate professionals as virtually a separate city from lower Manhattan, for reasons that should soon be clear). Millions of regional residents live within a comfortable one-hour commute from midtown, thanks mostly to three networks of suburban rail lines radiating outward from Grand Central Terminal and Penn Station and extending east across Long Island (Long Island Rail Road), the northern suburbs and Connecticut (MetroNorth) and, less extensively, into northern New Jersey (NJ Transit).
Now imagine if all those commuters who pour into Grand Central were instead required to interrupt their journey at MetroNorth’s second-to-last stop, 125th St. and Park Ave., fold up their newspapers and laptops, detrain and walk down a few flights to catch a subway to go the last four miles of the trip. Imagine how LIRR riders would feel if, rather than taking a train that delivered them directly to Penn Station (or transferring at Jamaica, Queens, for one that did), they were forced to get off at the line’s westernmost stop but one (Woodside, Queens) and climb several flights to take the No. 7 subway for their commute’s final five-mile leg. How long would it be before riders demanded a remedy?
Yet just such a trek is required of anyone attempting to reach downtown from anywhere beyond New York City’s limits. The longest trip one can make to downtown by any single means—apart from by car, helicopter or private yacht, of course—is the 20-mile journey offered by a subway, the A train from Far Rockaway. To midtown the number of one-seat trips available by rail alone from suburban stations 20 or more miles away is 219; on a regular weekday the number of trains scheduled to arrive in midtown before 8:45 A.M. from stations 20 or more miles away is 193. The comparable numbers for downtown are zero and zero. To reach downtown, suburbanites must take a train to either Grand Central or Penn Station in midtown, NJ Transit’s terminal in Hoboken or LIRR’s Flatbush Ave. terminal in Brooklyn, then take a subway (either New York’s or the New Jersey–to–New York PATH system) to lower Manhattan—with this transfer alone accounting for at least five minutes of the journey (more if there’s a wait on the platform). As a result, midtown office space today commands rents that are typically two thirds higher than equivalent space downtown ($75 versus $45 a square foot).
As recently as 25 years ago, one industry in particular was willing to put up with downtown’s difficult commute. Financiers and stockbrokers had long felt that proximity to the New York Stock Exchange’s trading floor was as essential to their business as it was in the days of clipper ships—the last era when downtown Manhattan’s commuting options clearly surpassed midtown’s. But this concern receded as electronic trading took off in the 1980s and firms like First Boston, PaineWebber and Bear Stearns fled for pricier but easier-to-reach quarters in midtown, followed soon enough by their favored law firms and accountants.
By the late 1990s, much of the industry known as Wall Street was comfortably ensconced in midtown and the battle for commercial primacy in Manhattan was over. Today downtown’s 91 million square feet of office space amounts to less than a third of midtown’s total of 300 million square feet (though downtown still represents the fourth-largest such concentration in the U.S., trailing just midtown, Chicago’s Loop and Washington, D.C.). So why bother attempting to salvage what’s left with the multibillion-dollar grand scheme illustrated on the preceding pages? Why not just let downtown continue with what seems to some (including New York’s business-savvy mayor) to be an inevitable shift toward residential and mixed-use tenants—a trend that’s continued despite Congress’s authorizing more than a billion dollars of tax-free Liberty Bonds to help lower Manhattan businesses get back on their feet? (Whatever Congress’s intentions, many residential projects have managed to qualify for the bonds.)
Several reasons. First, as the existence of those Liberty Bonds indicates, federal spigots can be tapped for a grand project that might rally the nation. And few projects have more spirit-lifting potential than adding a major new mass-transit gateway to a city that today has only two (four if you count two bus terminals) and has openly mourned the decapitation of one of them (the above-ground part of Penn Station) for fully two generations. (An effort to move Penn Station to more iconic digs a block west has received more than $230 million in federal backing to date—though an actual plan has yet to be finalized.) For comparison, consider that London has 13 major rail terminals within its city limits and Tokyo at least six, including the world’s busiest, Shinjuku, with 3 million-plus daily visitors. (Penn Station is the U.S.’s busiest rail terminal, with about 550,000 daily visitors.) Paris, with a metropolitan population about half that of New York’s, boasts four, plus two more just for freight trains. Even Boston has two.
Second, the infrastructure we’re proposing here compares favorably with the other projects of this sort planned for the New York region. True, the relocated Penn station might be cheaper (the latest estimates call for $800 million in addition to the $230 million already spent), but that project wouldn’t enhance the regional rail network except in a purely cosmetic way. By contrast, a mere six miles of tunneling would transform the World Trade Center’s underground train station into a true regional hub, a destination suddenly just a one-seat, one-mode ride away from such locales as Montauk, 120 miles to the east; Port Jervis, 70 miles to the north (where New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania meet); and Asbury Park, 50 miles to the south. Not only would downtown’s economic prospects be enhanced by such service, so would those of Montauk, Port Jervis, Asbury Park and the rest of the existing stations in the two previously unlinked networks. And thanks to Amtrak’s existing connection with NJ Transit west of Hoboken, all of the stations in the newly joined network would benefit from similar one-seat, long-distance route offerings between downtown and points south of New York on Amtrak’s northeast corridor—such as Philadelphia (90 miles away) and Washington (225 miles).
The Six Mile Plan also compares favorably with another project that has recently advanced beyond the drawing board: the Second Avenue subway. First proposed in 1929, the planned 8.5-mile line is to bore through bedrock running the length of Manhattan’s east side, with disruptive above-ground construction for 15 new stations along the way. Deserving as this long-overdue extension is, the benefits will be reserved for subway users—Manhattanites above all—and yet the project is now expected to cost $16.8 billion and take 17 years to complete. Tunneling for the Six Mile Plan, by contrast, would happen primarily underwater and would involve no station stops between Hoboken and Flatbush Ave., other than the World Trade Center itself. That’s one reason we project that the plan’s cost would be $6–9 billion—not out of line with comparable New York–area projects such as the $6 billion trans-Hudson tunnel planned to increase NJ Transit’s service into midtown.
But haven’t the developers of the World Trade Center site already addressed transport concerns with their two approved projects, a $750 million system of passageways under Fulton Street and a $2 billion permanent replacement for the PATH subway station that’s being designed by renowned architect Santiago Calatrava? Not really. Certainly, free transfers among nearby subways make sense, but they won’t extend downtown’s reachability by an inch. Nor will anyone’s commute be improved by Calatrava’s station, which will merely provide entry to the PATH subway, a Newark-to-Manhattan railroad that has not been significantly expanded beyond the dozen miles of track laid out in 1908.
The history of a 1960s rehab project involving Manhattan’s Chelsea Piers, another transport facility that dates to the early 1900s, should give pause to those who expect great things from Calatrava’s station. Once the centerpiece of a busy Hudson River waterfront serving ocean-going passenger liners (the Titantic was supposed to arrive there), the piers were past their prime by the middle of the last century, a victim of the airplane age. Persuaded that the piers’ future lay in handling cargo, a coalition of city agencies, dockworkers’ unions and private shipping operators replaced the decaying granite-and-wood structures with up-to-date steel sheds. But the project failed to take into account the shipping industry’s shift to containerization, and by 1967 the pier operators had all left for container-friendly facilities in New Jersey. Today the massive sheds house a privately run fitness and recreation center, including a 40-lane bowling alley.
But wait, aren’t passenger trains another example of yesterday’s technology? What makes us think our proposal won’t leave downtown with its own multi-billion-dollar bowling alley in a generation or two? Fair questions—from anyone who lives outside the northeast corridor or Europe. Readers who doubt that century-old rail infrastructure remains relevant to New York’s regional economy should look toward New Jersey today, in particular the west side of the Hudson River across from downtown Manhattan. For the past decade or so a skyline has steadily risen in Jersey City and northward toward Hoboken, where a rail station little changed since it opened in 1907 is the busiest terminus of NJ Transit’s northern rail network. With the recent rise of office towers nearby, what was once primarily a way station for Manhattan-bound commuters has itself become a major destination—and a marked contrast with the dusty pit just a few miles away across the river.
In short, the Six Mile Plan is a paradigm for a public works project: a civic-minded investment that stands a better-than-average chance of bringing widespread, tangible benefits to one of the nation’s most populous regions over a period that could well span generations. As such it is an attempt to put the horse—that is, sound economics—back before the cart represented by the rest of the proposals for the World Trade Center site. Once the underground station has been built and covered up, work on those other plans can resume—not without some modification, of course, but without necessarily reopening any of the past few years’ bruising debates. For now, however sacrilegious this may sound to some, it’s worth observing that the site could comfortably accommodate all the below-ground infrastructure that makes Grand Central go, is free of zoning restrictions and already under the control of a single government entity (the one responsible for developing and operating regional transport facilities, no less) and, what is more, has been fully excavated.
The inefficiency of the New York region’s rail system has been recognized for over 100 years. It’s probably just a coincidence that the government entity that today controls the World Trade Center site, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, was formed to address this very problem, in 1921. Back then the primary concern was the movement of freight, not people, in and out of Manhattan’s busy markets, piers and industrial districts, and the most direct beneficiaries of any proposed public investments were the area’s then-profitable railroads; so it’s no surprise that the Port Authority’s 1920s plan to solve the problem—a comprehensive system of rail tunnels and terminals—came to nothing. Could the fate of a grand plan designed to move people turn out differently? One can dream. ⊗
About the writer: Stephen Davis, Proof’s founding editor, counts himself among the estimated 4 million Americans who commute to work on foot.
About the artists: John Wagner spent three years drawing two detailed panoramas of Manhattan’s skyline prior to the 9/11 attacks. Each cityscape includes more than 3,000 buildings and can be viewed at www.grandscapes.biz. Wagner lives in Colorado. Dale Glasgow lives with his wife and five daughters on a farm in Hartwood, Virginia. His art has appeared in National Geographic magazine, USA Today and many Fortune 500 companies’ publications.
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