(The following article by Edwin McDowell was posted on the New York Times’ website on July 27.)
NEW YORK — A sprawling new $12 million train maintenance building scheduled to begin operating next year in Hoboken is unusual both for its function and for a design that emphasizes the independent but related roles of its separate parts.
At 29,000 square feet and 400 feet long, the building, which replaces an obsolete structure in the Hoboken Yard complex, allows trains laying over between morning and evening rush hours to be washed, fueled and supplied with the sand that is sprinkled on the tracks to provide additional traction on ice, snow and leaves.
The building will also provide New Jersey Transit, its owner, with added storage area and more capacity for handling additional trains after service is increased on many of the rail lines near the end of this year, when the new Secaucus transfer station, which will enable passengers to ride directly into Manhattan, begins operating.
The building has four individual compartments: one for washing the trains, another for fueling and sanding, a third for the building’s mechanical equipment and another that includes lockers, washing facilities and an employee lunchroom on the second floor with panoramic views of the seven and a half acre trainyard. The exterior is clad in steel panels of varying shades of silver grays to blue grays, because, according to Richard Metsky, a partner in Beyer Blinder Belle, the New York architectural firm that designed it, “we wanted the building to blend into the industrial character of the trainyard.”
To accomplish that, he added, it is constructed of such off-the-shelf industrial components as corregated siding, metal panels and concrete.
“We wanted to express each of the individual elements of the building and that each compartment functions independently,” Mr. Metsky said, “and it gave us the opportunity to create a more interesting architectural composition.”
The fact that it is Beyer Blinder Belle designing such an industrial building might surprise people who associate the firm with restoration of architectural icons like Grand Central Station, Rockefeller Center and Ellis Island. But in 1999 the firm prepared a 10-year modernization plan for New Jersey Transit. This new building is part of that effort.
Three years ago, the firm completed the renovation of the Hoboken railroad terminal’s Beaux-Arts main waiting room, and now it is at work restoring the decades-old, long-defunct Hoboken ferry terminal, which is expected to be shipshape in 2007.