Three and a half years ago, we took a look at the outlines of a plan to replace the Port Authority Bus Terminal with something less overloaded and less ghastly. In the absence of a huge amount of data, we found it enticing if perhaps impractically clean-looking. (White walls and bus fumes — maybe not an ideal match.) Since then, the scheme has been moving along at the customary slow creep, as details get worked out and environmental review proceeds, and last week Streetsblog and Crain’s New York Business reported on a presentation to the City Planning Commission that revealed some more. A walk through its pages allows us to dare hope that this building — which was barely up to the job when it was new in 1950 and despite renovations is completely inadequate — might actually become functional. There will be lots of retail at the sidewalk level around the sides of the building — a big plus, as the current PABT makes a dead zone out of 40th Street. As we saw in 2021, a bus-storage-and-staging structure behind and slightly to the south of the current terminal, more or less where the knot of bus ramps is now, would lessen the number of idling and parked buses in the terminal itself. It will also serve as a temporary terminal for three years while the current building is demolished and the new one goes up.
More improvements that even someone just passing by will be able to grasp from the street: The dark and horrible 41st Street tunnel between the north and south halves of the terminal would finally be closed off to become the new building’s central atrium with a privately developed skyscraper going up on each side to underwrite the whole thing. (The towers will be face-to-face with the Torch, a loony-looking skyscraper going up at 45th and Eighth.) Other areas may gain a little volume — the ramps crossing Ninth and Tenth Avenues will likely be higher and bulkier than the current ones, though the as-of-right massing shown in the renderings makes them loom more than they likely will. If New Jersey’s commuting future is fundamentally going to be about buses — and it almost surely is — this project seems like the earthbound version of the La Guardia Airport overhaul. Both are hugely messy and disruptive, and both are inarguably necessary given that we have squeezed every drop of wear out of the facilities we have now. Now, La Guardia is actually kinda great, real proof that though we as a city and state sometimes overpay for these projects, we are capable of the fantastic logistical feats they require, of rebuilding our car’s engine while somehow continuing to drive down the highway nonstop.
Although one more detail had already been shown on a rendering years ago, it has been fleshed out here with a better image, and it caught our eye more than any other aspect of this plan. A short stretch of Dyer Avenue, the below-grade highway cut that takes exiting road traffic down to 34th Street, will be decked over and turned into green parkland. Now, it’s nothing huge — two blocks with a cross street through the middle. But there is nothing green over there right now, and those stretches from Ninth to Tenth Avenues are pretty much given over to automotive blight.
It’s an easy thing to imagine burying a highway, and it is often suggested but rarely done. Expense, logistics, and general fear of project bloat probably are the principal culprits. There is, of course, the Big Dig, a project of Pharaonic scale that eliminated downtown Boston’s Central Artery and created a huge green park through the middle of the city. There is talk about doing something similar in Buffalo. Here in New York, an assessment from 2008 suggested that it was feasible to deck over various roads and rail lines all over town. Some could be parks; others would return to grade-level street function, reuniting neighborhoods slashed in half in a less enlightened era. And, of course, we once had a plan in place to replace virtually all of the Miller Highway — the old decrepit, elevated West Side drive — with a tunnel called Westway, but after a contentious environmental review and a lot of NIMBY pushback and lawyering, that project went unbuilt. Claiming two little blocks atop Dyer Avenue is hardly reimagining two miles of West Side waterfront or knitting East Tremont back together. But if it’s an ancillary benefit to fixing the busiest and arguably worst bus terminal in America, that’s a yes.