(The following story by Fernanda Santos appeared on the New York Times website on May 22, 2009.)
NEW YORK — The officials who gathered on Thursday to unveil a new Metro-North Railroad station in the South Bronx repeatedly extolled two of the project’s most significant accomplishments: It was finished on time (unlike the parks that are meant to replace the ones displaced by the new Yankee Stadium) and on budget (unlike the parks and the stadium itself).
The station connects the Yankees’ new ballpark to Grand Central Terminal in 15 minutes and links the area to places as far north as New Haven, Conn., and Poughkeepsie and Southeast, N.Y. It also has a 450-foot pedestrian bridge that leads from the stadium to the parks that are being built on the Harlem River waterfront.
It cost $91 million — $39 million financed by the city and the rest by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority — and it was concluded in exactly two years, in spite of the fact that it was built over active railroad tracks, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said.
“It’s another alternative to taking the subway here,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “And the more alternatives you give, the fewer people will drive.”
Reducing traffic in an area that has one of the city’s highest asthma rates is one of the station’s main goals. Transportation authority officials estimate that on game days alone, 10,000 people will pass through the station, having forgone their cars for a train ride. On other days, the expectation is that 5,000 to 10,000 people on average will take the train.
“What this does here is it helps mitigate that traffic congestion,” said the Bronx borough president, Rubén Díaz Jr., who was sworn in moments after the station’s opening ceremony, attended by the Yankees general manager, Brian Cashman; catcher Jorge Posada; and former pitcher David Cone, now a commentator on the team’s YES Network.
Mr. Díaz said that traffic congestion was one factor contributing to the high incidence of asthma and other respiratory ailments among local residents. The lack of green space is another, and when construction of the new stadium called for the destruction of 22 acres of parkland, protests ensued.
State law requires lost parkland to be replaced, and the city agreed to create eight smaller parks, which altogether amount to 32 acres. The project has been beset by cost overruns and delays, though.
“The problem with the parks is that a lot of this land needs remediation,” Mayor Bloomberg explained. “I think when we started to dig, we found a much more serious contamination than we thought. You have to do it safely, and you try to do it as fast as we can.”
He added: “The station is a simpler thing, in some senses, because it’s all brand new and you didn’t have to replace anything. It was difficult because they had to build over a working railway. But if you take look at some of these parks and see how much has to be dug out, some of them are going on top of buildings. The bottom line in the end is, we’re going to have these parks.”
Liam Kavanagh, first deputy commissioner at the city’s parks department, said that two new parks had been built and that improvements at the John Mullaly Park, which had to be partly destroyed by the new stadium, had been concluded. In addition, Mr. Kavanagh said, the rooftop and waterfront parks will be done in December.
“We’re moving ahead as fast as we can,” he said.