One hundred and forty feet below Grand Central Terminal sandhogs have excavated caverns spacious enough to dock a Carnival Cruise ship. The caverns will eventually support eight tracks and four platforms to handle Long Island Rail Road trains carrying upwards of 160,000 daily commuters to and from Manhattan’s East Side. This enormous construction project will cost over $8 billion when completed. It will redraw New York City’s commuter map by adding 7.75 miles of new tunnels that will run from Sunnyside Yards in Queens under the East River, down Park Avenue, into Grand Central, and continue down to 35th Street for a train holding yard. This big project is virtually invisible to office workers, commuters and tourists who happily continue on their way while the sandhogs blast and work in floodlit caverns below.

Dr. Michael Horodniceanu, the President of the MTA Capital Construction Company, is in charge of the project. He described the project at a CityLaw breakfast on October 14, 2011. [See the video on www.citylaw.org]. On November 8, 2011, Dr. Horodniceanu led a tour of the caverns and construction sites. From the Lower Level of Grand Central, the tour members, outfitted with vests, hard hats and muck boots, entered a subterranean world of anthropomorphic earthmoving machines and floodlit rock- and mud-scapes. Sandhogs were blasting three massive shafts for escalators that will eventually descend via slopes of 60 degrees to the mezzanine and platforms below. At the lower platform level workers waterproofed and finished the cavern’s ceiling. Other workers were applying, pouring or finishing concrete walls. The subterranean work will continue probably until 2016.

The scale of the East Side Access project rivals the original construction of Penn Station or Grand Central itself, although the artistry and grandeur of those earlier projects remain unequaled. The Robert Moses era of building big may have ended forty years ago, but big public works projects can still be built: witness the Second Avenue subway, the extension of the No. 7 line, the Third Water Tunnel and East Side Access. Robert Moses famously disliked tunnels because they did not change the skyline. The subterranean infrastructure projects currently being built will not change the skyline, but they ensure that New York City will continue to be a livable city.

Owner claimed that narrow lot adjacent to elevated rail line could not accommodate conforming manufacturing use. Hayden Hester applied for a use variance to construct a three-story residential building on a vacant lot at 1978 Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. Hester’s proposal called for a 4,200 sq.ft building with five dwelling units on a lot twenty feet wide and zoned for light manufacturing. A Long Island Rail Road elevated rail line runs along Atlantic Avenue in front of the project site.

Hester claimed the narrow lot and the presence of the elevated rail line would constrain a viable manufacturing or commercial development. The lot’s width would result in inefficient, small floor plates, and the rail line would interfere with loading and unloading from Atlantic Avenue. Hester submitted evidence indicating that a residential structure had formerly occupied the site and that there had been no manufacturing or commercial use on the site in the past 100 years. Out of the 103 lots fronting the south side of Atlantic Avenue, only two had twenty-foot frontages and commercial uses. (read more…)

Owner claimed that narrow lot adjacent to elevated rail line could not accommodate conforming manufacturing use. Hayden Hester applied for a use variance to construct a three-story residential building on a vacant lot at 1978 Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. Hester’s proposal called for a 4,200 sq.ft building with five dwelling units on a lot twenty feet wide and zoned for light manufacturing. A Long Island Rail Road elevated rail line runs along Atlantic Avenue in front of the project site.

Hester claimed the narrow lot and the presence of the elevated rail line would constrain a viable manufacturing or commercial development. The lot’s width would result in inefficient, small floor plates, and the rail line would interfere with loading and unloading from Atlantic Avenue. Hester submitted evidence indicating that a residential structure had formerly occupied the site and that there had been no manufacturing or commercial use on the site in the past 100 years. Out of the 103 lots fronting the south side of Atlantic Avenue, only two had twenty-foot frontages and commercial uses.

BSA granted the variance, finding that the lot’s narrow width created a hardship in developing a conforming use. BSA also found that introducing five residential units on the site would not negatively affect the neighborhood character, noting that the subject block’s southern portion permitted residential uses and that the proposal would be permitted as-of-right on the north.

BSA: 1978 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn (256-07-BZ) (March 23, 2010) (Rothkrug, Rothkrug & Spector, for Hester). CITYADMIN