The No. 7 subway line extension to 11th Avenue and West 34th Street won’t carry passengers until mid-2014 — six months later than was widely expected — and the new station won’t be entirely finished until the end of 2015, the MTA said yesterday.
The agency had long cited a December 2013 target opening.
But “passenger train service [to the new station] is scheduled for June 2014,” an MTA spokesman told us.
The six-month delay is hopefully not a sign of greater trouble at a project that’s of paramount importance to Gary Barnett’s Extell Development Co. and Stephen M. Ross’ Related Cos.
It’s also crucial to City Hall, which heralds it as the mass-transit gateway to a redeveloped Far West Side.
The station’s at the doorstep of One Hudson Yards, the 56-story office tower Extell plans to build on 11th Avenue and 33rd and 34th streets.
It’s also a selling point for Related’s 26-acre Hudson Yards, where Ross hopes to start building a headquarters tower for Coach Inc. this year.
Asked to explain earlier statements that the station would open in December 2013, agency rep Aaron Donovan said, “We do expect to have trains running for test purposes by December 2013.”
Donovan said the changed timetable was not due to a recent fatal crane accident which caused a temporary work halt, but declined to explain farther.
Reps for Related and Extell declined to comment.
The Post’s Tom Namako reported in December 2010 that the No. 7 completion “could be pushed from 2013 into 2014.” But the MTA long stuck to the 2013 date.
Ann Weisbrod, president of the city’s Hudson Yards Development Corp., said the 2014 date “has been the plan for two years.” She pointed us to a corner of the MTA Web site which indeed says, “Revenue service to begin June 2014.”
But as recently as last November, the site stated the MTA would “initiate service” to the station in December 2013 — a date echoed in numerous news articles.
Expectations the job would be done by then were so widespread that Extell — which helped the MTA prepare the land — said last week in a statement about its office tower that the station was “on schedule for completion by December 2013.”
The delay in the $2.1 billion project to extend the No. 7 line from Times Square to the Hudson Yards District comes on the heels of a much worse setback to the MTA’s East Side Access project to bring the LIRR into Grand Central Terminal.
East Side Access now won’t be finished until 2019 — three years later than the most recent target date.
Meanwhile, Donovan said one part of the new No. 7 station won’t be fully completed until December 2015 — its north entrance at West 35th Street.
The main entrance will be on 11th Avenue between 33rd and 34th streets.
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Here’s a way to invest in banks without the nuisance of federal investigations and media scrutiny: buy properties that are netleased to bank retail branches.
Newmark Grubb Knight Frank Capital Group is marketing for sale a portfolio of 11 Citibank freestanding branches in the metropolitan area.
Kenneth L. Zakin, part of a team that includes Randall E. Liberman and Hymie M. Dweck, called it “a unique opportunity for an investor to acquire individual Citibank retail branches in strong neighborhood locations.”
The properties include two in the Bronx, three in Brooklyn, two in Nassau County, three in Queens and one in Westchester.
Zakin, noting, “we’ve positioned them as individual sales,” said two of the branches are already under contract. The branches are priced at between $1.5 million-$7 million each, with a total value of about $43 million.
Citibank netleases all 11 branches. Three of the sites are buildings that have other small tenants as well.
Zakin said the branches represent a “a great buy” for investors seeking a 1031 tax exchange — “We’ve seen an explosion of these recently,” he said.