Long Hard Road Ahead for Upcoming Worth Street Construction
Worth Street, looking east from Hudson Street. Construction shown here is from the ongoing work on Hudson Street. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib
Beginning this fall, you can look ahead to five years of construction on Worth Street, seven days a week.
That’s the prognosis for the nine-block stretch of roadway between Hudson Street and Park Row. City officials delivered the news last month to Community Board 1’s Tribeca Committee, saying that many details of the $90- million utility repair and replacement work, to begin this fall a block at a time, won’t be known until a contractor comes on board.
What is certain, said Norberto Acevedo, Jr., of the city’s Department of Design and Construction, is that there will be disruptions along the street to traffic, bus stops, parking, deliveries and, periodically, water service.
When there is construction between West Broadway and Church, for example, barricades will be set up on the north side of two-way Worth between West Broadway and Church, with traffic only permitted to pass eastbound on the south side of the street.
As a result of the work, some bus stops may need to be closed or relocated. Water will be shut off for up to eight hours at a time, according to Acevedo.
Allowable hours of work will be Monday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. (with the potential of some overnight work from 9 p.m to 5 a.m.), Saturday from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Some community board members didn’t like those hours and asked if they could be changed. But altering the work schedule, said Luis Sanchez, the Department of Transportation’s Lower Manhattan Borough Commissioner, could increase the cost of the project by millions.
“The more restrictive [the schedule] is, that $90 million also becomes $100 million,” he said. “So that means $10 million comes from some other part of the city budget.
He added, “This is like a balancing act in terms of trying to get the infrastructure done, trying to do it cost-effectively, and understanding that there will be community impacts.”
Recalling what have been seemingly endless construction projects in the neighborhood, Bruce Ehrmann, a 27-year resident of Worth Street, said he worried about the work on his street dragging on like others. The still-ongoing Chambers Street Reconstruction Project, for example, was expected to take three years when it began in the summer of 2010.
“I don’t think any of us intends to go through the kinds of reconstruction scenarios that have been going on with Chambers and Hudson [projects],” he said.
Acevedo told the committee that he would be open to holding “task force” meetings, where neighbors could voice their concerns about the project to the Department of Design and Construction and other agencies.
“That could be at your call,” Acevedo said. “You want [those meetings] once a week, fine. Once a month, fine. We could certainly do that.”
Community feedback helped change the course of the Chambers Street project, Acevedo noted. Complaints from the community board about the two-block-long segments of work prompted his department to limit the construction to single blocks.
Michael F. Barrow, a partner at Xeno Lights, a lighting rental company at 1 Worth St., was concerned about how the work would affect deliveries. Acevedo said that such issues would be worked out once the construction begins.
“Within moments of you saying there’s a problem,” he said, “we would definitely be out there and dealing with construction barricades to get them out of your way.” Acevedo said he would return to the committee with additional information after a contractor is hired and more of the project’s plans become final.