The scariest threat to East Midtown now comes not from advocacy groups trying to hijack rezoning for their own pet projects, but from the 800-ton gorilla of capital-scheme boondoggles — the MTA.
“Stakeholders” such as community boards and preservationists are leveraging the distant possibility of meaningful rezoning in the Grand Central area to demand immediate “improvements” like wider sidewalks, new plazas and landmark (i.e., immortal) status for numerous ordinary buildings.
But the MTA is champing to get into the act on a monumental scale. Agency chief Thomas Prendergast told Crain’s he wants to redesign the East 53rd Street/Lexington Avenue station, among other dubious schemes, even before rezoning would let larger new buildings go up.
The idea is that existing platforms and passageways would be overwhelmed by an influx of new workers that rezoning would bring.
But, what new workers? Except for on a few blocks of Vanderbilt Avenue, the city’s campaign to rezone the East 40s and 50s is so lacking in conviction and urgency, it might be decades before anything changes.
Memo to subway riders: Brace for a decade of platform closures, train reroutings and escalators and stairways even more miserable than they are now.
The MTA does a remarkably good job running the subways and buses, but its capital projects too often turn into megabucks boondoggles.
Any notion that the MTA should upgrade subway stations in the Grand Central area should be shot down over the catastrophe the agency has visited upon Grand Central Terminal itself — the infamously late and over-budget East Side Access scheme to bring the LIRR into the station.
Although out of sight below ground, the project kick-started by former Sen. Al D’Amato to stroke his Long Island power base handily dwarfs the Port Authority’s World Trade Center “Hub” for sheer waste.
Its cost has soared from $4 billion to $10 billion-plus. Once predicted to open in 2009, it won’t be finished until 2023. It’s suffered one engineering setback after another — no surprise for a job entailing tunnel-boring under Queens, the East River and Manhattan.
Any lessons to be learned here?
Yup: Once a capital-project horror show begins, there’s no stopping it at any cost — as at the MTA’s still-unfinished Fulton Transit Center, which needed a half-billion-dollar federal bailout.
Unlike at Fulton, East Midtown transit upgrades might be paid for in part by developers whom the city intends to charge for public amenities attached to their new buildings.
So Prendergast may think the MTA (and taxpayers) would be out of pocket for less than the roughly half-billion dollars the agency says it would need for rezoning-area projects.
Reality check: Money from developers might not come for years — if ever. Actual rezoning of most of East Midtown is stalled, even as major companies continue to flee the obsolescent district where buildings average 70 years old.
Next likely to leave is Hudson’s Bay Co., parent of Lord & Taylor and Saks Fifth Avenue, which is in talks to move 450,000 square feet of offices from East 49th Street to Brookfield Place downtown.
But, instead of recognizing a crisis, Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer and Council Member Dan Garodnick have picked a “steering committee” of eight “stakeholder” groups with wildly divergent agendas to make recommendations to the city by spring 2015.
Except for the Real Estate Board of New York and the Grand Central Partnership, the others are more committed to public “amenities” and preservation than to simply allowing a few new buildings to go up.
Yet eight were not enough: Garodnick and Brewer just told the Commercial Observer they’ll give unions a say as well.
At this rate, the MTA won’t have to spend a dime to relieve congestion — the job will be done by even more companies bolting from what was once the world’s greatest business district.