(rshsdepot) NYC: 72nd St. Station Project

["James Dent" <james.dent_@_itochu.com>]

-From the NY Times...

April 10, 2001
Tunnel Vision: 72nd St. Station Project Has Riders Feeling Squeezed

By RANDY KENNEDY

When thinking about the stately, spindly anachronism that is known as the
72nd Street Subway Station, here are some interesting facts to consider:

Less than 20 years before the station opened in 1904, the Upper West Side
was still so bucolic that this newspaper described how buildings were just
beginning to outnumber big rocks, of the towering sort "usually crowned by a
rickety shanty and a browsing goat."

Little more than 20 years after it opened, the Transit Authority was already
talking about making the tiny station bigger because it had helped the
neighborhood around it to grow so big that the station itself had become far
too small.

Now, almost a century after it opened, the station is exactly the same size
as it always was and the platforms within it are no more commodious than
they were in 1904: 15 1/2 feet at their widest, about as wide as the deck of
a deluxe bass boat.

And yet the neighborhood that uses the station is the most densely populated
residential area in Manhattan and one of the most dense in the country. (New
census figures are still being parsed, but in 1990 there were 210,993 Upper
West Siders living in an area of less than two square miles.)

Most mornings and evenings, as anyone who uses the station knows too well,
it feels like nearly every one of these people and their extended families
are trying to troop single file up or down the station's 48-inch- wide
staircases — the ones that have the antique wooden handles and the steepness
of Gothic steeples.

"Oh my God, there it is, there it is, there it is," said a balding,
perspiring man yesterday after triumphantly squeezing through a downtown
turnstile just before 9 a.m. and thinking he might actually catch the train
he could hear pulling into the station below.

"There it goes, there it goes," he said sadly, as he shuffled along with the
churning crowd at the top of the stairs and listened as his train pulled
out.

"Oy," he added.

Down below a few minutes later, the downtown platform looked like an
overfilled lifeboat.

The people on it looked angry enough to start throwing their shipmates
overboard. And quite a few people teetered close enough to the edge to make
this easy.

"It's rush and push and cuss," said Mae Dawson, a retired home health aide.
"Horrible. Horrible."

She added, "And lots of vulgar language."

She held her ground as people swarmed around her off the stairs. "I stay in
the middle here." she said. "You just never know."

Generally, when New York City Transit begins a multimillion-dollar
renovation of a subway station — in the case of 72nd Street, a $53 million
project, which began last year — there are at least small signs of hope
among riders, even amid the jackhammers.

But the people who regularly use the 72nd Street station are unusually
well-informed about their renovation project. And while it will add four new
stairways and elevator service to the north end of the platforms, while it
will extend the platforms by about 50 feet, while it will wipe away the
patina of age from the sagging station, it will not do the only thing that
Marvin Durell, for one, really cares about.

"You know what's going to happen?" said Mr. Durell, a manager at an
auto-parts company. "In the evening, the extra stairs are going to help
people get out faster. Fine. That's nice.

"But in the morning, exactly the opposite's going to happen. People are
going to be able to get in here faster. And the platform's still going to be
this narrow. And then what's going to happen?"

Even longtime critics of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's plans
concede that the agency is, almost literally, caught between a rock and a
hard place.

The station is mostly sunk into solid bedrock. Estimates for what it would
cost to blast out some of that rock on the downtown side alone — to widen
the subway's trench, relocate all the utilities, move the tracks out and
widen the platform there — have ranged as high as $200 million.

That is more than twice the amount now being spent on renovations at the
Times Square station, a station that handles millions more riders a year.

Which means that 72nd Street subway riders have basically these things to
look forward to: more dust, more noise, more diversions and more R.C.A.'s,
the menacing, bright yellow construction shacks that say "restricted
clearance area" and make the platforms even smaller.

And when it is all over two years from now, what they will probably notice
is that they will have a little more room to stand at the end of the
platform.

"People don't stand at the very end of the platform," said Andrew Albert,
chairman of the Transit Riders Council, an advisory group. "Unless they have
some other business they're taking care of."

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