A sneak peek inside the MTA's palatial $1.4B Fulton Center
The hub allows access to nine lines and has natural light, spiral staircases, granite and more.
by Pete Donohue
The $1.4 billion Fulton Center subway station is still under construction, but is mostly completed.
Julia Xanthos/New York Daily News
Standing at Fulton St. and Broadway one recent morning, a gentleman tilted his head back and looked up at the bright blue sky above him in lower Manhattan.
“So what?†you might ask.
Well, he was standing in a subway station one floor below street level.
And it was air-conditioned.
This isn’t the dungeon-like experience that usually follows a MetroCard swipe.
The Fulton Center — the MTA’s $1.4 billion transit hall that initially will provide a new means of access to nine subway lines — is not yet open.
The Fulton Center will provide a gateway to Lower Manhattan and better connections for riders.
Patrick Cashin//MTA
But if you managed a sneak peek behind the temporary construction walls, you’d see that the project is 99% completed.
Workers are knocking off “punch list†items, testing the public address systems, putting face plates over electrical outlets, installing handrails on spiral — yes, spiral — staircases.
In some areas of the hub, workers are cleaning up, sweeping sawdust off granite floors and picking up the last of their tools.
Enter from the street and walk down a flight of stairs, or take an escalator, and you’ll be on the transit hall’s upper mezzanine.
If you are like our gentleman trespasser, you might be struck by the fact that the hall is illuminated by natural light entering through a 90-foot-wide oculus. That’s a fancy word for skylight.
Sweeping architecture is the hallmark of the Fulton Center.
Julia Xanthos/New York Daily News
The opening doesn’t offer a sweeping view of the heavens. But its a far cry better than the cavernous subway stations with jailhouse ambiance, like Bowery in Manhattan, Norwood in the Bronx and Vernon/Jackson in Queens. The Fulton Center isn’t an upgrade. For most subway riders, this is another planet.
A web of steel cables descends from the circular skylight like a net hanging down from a basketball hoop. This web, however, is adorned with nearly 1,000 diamond-shaped pieces of aluminum, patched together like a puzzle. The giant piece of art reflects the sky downward and through the building.
Natural light also passes to the Fulton Center’s lowest level, through a smaller but sizeable opening in the mezzanine. This is called the “mixing bowl,†where hundreds of thousands of subway riders and tourists will cross paths, similar to the scene on Grand Central Terminal’s marbled floors.
And all of them — at least once — will stop and look upward to the sky.