A plaque remaining from the Big Apple Night Club at West 135th Street and Seventh Avenue in Harlem.

Above, a 1934 plaque from the Big Apple Night Club at West 135th Street and Seventh Avenue in Harlem. Discarded as trash in 2006. Now a Popeyes fast food restaurant on Google Maps.

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“Shout out to ATM fees for making me buy my own money” (3/27)
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Entry from June 28, 2006
Downtown Grand Central (Fulton Street Hub)
The Fulton Center (a Lower Manhattan transit center and retail complex centered at the intersection of Fulton Street and Broadway, planned after the destruction caused by the September 11, 2001 attacks) has been called the "Downtown Grand Central" since at least January 23, 2002 and "Grand Central of Lower Manhattan" since at least February 17, 2003.

"Grand Central of Downtown" developed as the popular form of this Fulton Center nickname -- a nickname that has been said to have been used in the early 1900s for the Chambers Street (City Hall) subway station.


Wikipedia: Grand Central Terminal
Grand Central Terminal (GCT; also referred to as Grand Central Station or simply as Grand Central) is a commuter railroad terminal at 42nd Street and Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, United States. The terminal serves commuters traveling on the Metro-North Railroad to Westchester, Putnam, and Dutchess counties in New York, as well as to Fairfield and New Haven counties in Connecticut. The terminal also contains a connection to the New York City Subway at Grand Central–42nd Street.

Wikipedia: Fulton Center
Fulton Center is a transit center and retail complex centered at the intersection of Fulton Street and Broadway in Lower Manhattan, New York City. The name also refers to the $1.4 billion project by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), a public agency of the state of New York, to rehabilitate the New York City Subway's Fulton Street station. The work involved constructing new underground passageways and access points into the complex, renovating the constituent stations, and erecting a large station building that doubles as a part of the Westfield World Trade Center mall.

http://www.hudsoncity.net/tubes/plansfornewstation.html
January 23, 2002
Transit Plan Would Connect Dots Downtown
By RANDY KENNEDY
(...)
Under the plan, the PATH line, which terminated roughly beneath the World Trade Center plaza, would be extended a few hundred feet farther east to Church Street, where the shell of the old Manhattan and Hudson station, closed in 1971, still sits beneath the street. That shell would be lengthened to accommodate 10-car PATH trains and a large underground terminal — described by Mr. Gargano as a "kind of downtown Grand Central" — would be built around it under Church Street. (An alternate, less ambitious plan, would be to completely rebuild the PATH station in its old location and create a smaller terminal there, also connected to the walkway.)

Farther east, near the intersection of Dey and Broadway, a new subway terminal, which the plan calls a "future transit center," would be built by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, whose officials and engineers have been working with the Port Authority over the last few months. The transit center would provide better entrances to the subway and enlarge the mazelike Fulton Street subway complex, where the 2, 3, 4, 5, A, C, J, M and Z lines converge.

http://www.hudsoncity.net/tubes/exchangeplaceopeningdate.html
PATH stations closed since 9/11 to open soon
Monday, February 17, 2003 By Ron Marisco

PATH stations at Exchange Place in Jersey City and at Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan will reopen in June and December, respectively, according to officials from Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

The facilities, closed since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, are being refurbished under a roughly $2 billion project that eventually will tie in with a $5 billion plan to build a new transit hub in Lower Manhattan. That facility would link the PATH, myriad subway lines and ferry service for the first time downtown as a way to spur economic growth and accommodate tourists.

"This would become in spirit the Grand Central of Lower Manhattan," said Robert Davidson, the Port Authority's chief architect, updating the status of the transit projects for the New York at its meeting Friday.

Wired New York
JMGarcia
April 15th, 2003, 09:09 PM
The MTA has posted some more info on the Fulton St. Transit Center plans here:
http://www.mta.nyc.ny.us/capconstr/fstc

Stern
April 15th, 2003, 10:00 PM
And I suppose this is a generic version of the Grand Central of Lower Manhattan.

JMGarcia
April 15th, 2003, 10:12 PM
This is for the Fulton and B'way station as opposed to the "Downtown Grand Central" at the WTC site. Can't quite figure out why they both have to be so grand. I say let the developer pay for underground improvements in exchange for building a tower on the corner of Fulton and B'wy. That way the public money can be focused on the Day St. connection and Libeskind's transit center.

dbhstockton
April 15th, 2003, 10:17 PM
And it's pathetic to call any kind of subway station, no matter how many transfer points it has, a "Grand Central." Really pathetic.

If people keep doing that, I'm going to start calling my one bedroom apartment a "super-luxury duplex penthouse."

New York (NY) Post
N.Y.'S DISGRACE
STEVE CUOZZO
September 11, 2005 -- FOUR years after 9/11, and here's what a stroller at Ground Zero finds — testament to Gov. Pataki's appalling lack of leadership and Mayor Bloomberg's colossal indifference:
(...)
The Fulton Street Transit Center: The MTA's $750 million-plus project to "disentangle" the subway lines at Fulton Street is behind schedule. The state has yet to buy out property owners on the site.

A few months ago, the MTA said it was scaling back the plan for the "Grand Central of Downtown," shrinking its ornamental dome and the width of an underground concourse. For what sound like minor changes, it's sure taking a long time to redesign — the new look won't be shown until May.

New York (NY) Post
27 June 2006, New York Post, "Fowling Up Fulton: Pointless MTA project breeding costly chaos Downtown" by Steve Cuozzo, pg. 27:
THE 9/11 attacks prompted Washington to spot the city $4.51 billion for new transit schemes in Lower Manhattan. The MTA grabbed an item off its wish list of far-fetched, someday-maybe schemes - and soon presented plans for a "Grand Central of Downtown." A dramatic dome of glass and steel would replace a blockfront of ugly old buildings, we were told, rising 110 feet above the street and bringing daylight onto platforms deep below ground.

No one but The Post challenged the folly of spending a fortune to let the sun shine on a subway platform. And what else will the project bring us - if it's ever finished?

AMNY
MTA: Fulton Street hub won't be scaled back
BY HERBERT LOWE
NEWSDAY STAFF WRITER
June 27, 2006
(...)
Cost overruns and environmental concerns will still delay the transit center's opening from December 2008 to June 2009, the report states.

Commuter advocates Monday cheered the MTA's decision to stay the course with the hub, which is being built on Broadway between Fulton and John streets and will connect with the PATH terminal at the trade center site.

"It's very good news," said Andrew Albert, chairman of the New York City Transit Riders Council and a non-voting MTA board member. "Transit riders wanted this all along to be a large, beautiful, functional and unique transportation center. It was originally billed as the 'Grand Central of downtown,' and we were upset with the initial scaling back."
Posted by Barry Popik
New York CityTransportation • Wednesday, June 28, 2006 • Permalink


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