Site area:

plaza: 36,500 SF per plaza = 73,000 SF total

total retail / commercial: 44,000 SF / building = 174,000 SF total

EL STEPS

The New York city subway is the 11th busiest metro system in the world with 5.65 million passengers passing through its 472 stations daily. That’s close to 12,000 passengers on average visiting each station every day. Of the 472 stations, 153 or 32% are elevated - or 1.8 million passengers a day.

The elevated tracks and stations - sometimes called the els - traverse the centers of the city’s avenues. They are made of bolted together steel columns and trusses, suspended concourse platforms, and covered waiting areas at the track level. They're workaday, designed to meet a low bar of function and not much else. The streets around the stations have many bodegas and shops to meet the needs of the workers passing through on their way home.

Neighborhoods in cities are often formed around anchors: the duomo and parish church, municipal buildings, central plazas, fountains, markets, parks, and monuments. The secular city built for the modern worker has often developed around the train and metro stations. The experience of the Victorian era stations of Europe, Asia and all parts of the world was glorious: vast steel and glass roofs, grand stone facades, cafes, and mosaics. Some of this grandeur was borrowed from the grand Victorian stations for use in the subways that were built in the 20th century - Moscow being an exceptional example. But for reasons too complex to review here, in the case of New York, the stations were built around a different kind of aesthetic: function. And today, after many years of disinvestment, the stations are truly decrepit.

design response

We propose reinvesting in a vision of the elevated metro station as a neighborhood center, vested with the civic ideals and aesthetics which used to be manifest in the public spaces that we built in times gone by. Like a parish church or a Victorian train station, the new el station will have new activities, functions, grand spaces and constructions, all of which will form a new, bold, and hopeful identity for the neighborhood.

We propose closing the perpendicular approach street at each station to make a pedestrian precinct. On the closed streets we make two large plazas ringed with green space for recreation, outdoor markets, restaurant dining, and many other activities. Grand stairs - like of the Spanish Steps in Rome - connect the new plazas to the train concourse and platform. Flanking the plazas we propose new community and commercial buildings to house markets, restaurants and cafes, daycares, municipal functions like auditoria and conference facilities, and spaces devoted to multi-modal transportation (bike, skateboard, and scooter shops). The new el plazas connect to bike lanes, bus routes and taxi stands to make transport seamless.

With very little effort, our local stations transform from grim places we hurry through into destinations, spaces that give identity to our neighborhoods, places to enjoy activities with our friends and families. and where we build relationships and memories.