About Ground Zero Transit Hub

Fifty million people pass through the World Trade Center's stunning new transportation hub every year. This is Grand Central Station for the 21st century - a public cathedral that rivals its uptown counterpart in both scale and significance. Designed by world-famous architect Santiago Calatrava, this project attempts to create what could be one of the most important buildings ever constructed, in the heart of one of the busiest cities in the world, on a site more complex and closely scrutinized than any other. Almost everything about this project is unprecedented.

This will be the new front door to the most important 16 acres in New York and the regional gateway to lower Manhattan. As a piece of architecture, this project will be unlike anything the city or nation has ever seen - a soaring wave of gleaming white steel ribs, seemingly floating in the air, that will radically change the landscape of downtown New York forever. But while the transit hub's above ground entryway is what will immediately catch the eye, it's the cavernous underground space below that will elevate project from just a stunning piece of architecture to one of the most vitally useful projects in New York City.

On paper, it is staggering to look at - a sprawling, spacious transit hub that will seamlessly connect millions of commuters to 14 subway and PATH trains in a way no New Yorker has ever experienced. But the degree of complexity involved in physically creating the design is proportional to its brilliance. Even in a vacant lot isolated from the city, building a transit hub of this magnitude would be a tall order. But with its central placement inside the world's most complex construction site - sandwiched next to, beneath and in between several other Ground Zero mega-projects - it's become a Herculean task.

But building one of the most ambitious structures ever designed is only one of their challenges. The Mayor, the Governor and Executive Director of the Port Authority have all promised (publically) that the memorial pools and plaza WILL be open for 9/11/11 to commemorate the tenth year anniversary of the attacks. This non-negotiable deadline for the Memorial dictates the priorities of virtually every piece of the site, and most directly, the transportation hub — because it just so happens that the hub's massive underground concourse is located directly BELOW the northeast end of the Plaza. In other words, this underground portion of hub (called PATH HALL) is essentially supporting the plaza-therefore construction on the plaza cannot begin until the PATH Hall is complete. So it's a race against the clock to build the framework for the hub, above which the tree-lined plaza will essentially "float." It's an engineering challenge akin to suspending Central Park 100 feet in the air. And it has to happen now.