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\n Adding an elevator to the 81st Street station outside the American Museum of Natural History required a dig 40 feet deep, 32 of which were through solid rock.
\n Photo: Christopher Bonanos\n <\/p>\n
As we disembark from the G train at the Smith\u20139th Streets station, Matt Best issues a challenge:\u00a0Think about how we\u2019d get from here to the street without using the stairs.\u00a0Best is the chief engineer of the construction-and-development division at the MTA, and he and Jamie Torres-Springer, who runs the division, are showing me how they plan to add an elevator to this station. Smith\u20139th is built on a trestle over the Gowanus Canal, and as we make our way down three levels, platform to crossover to mezzanine to turnstiles, they point out a roadblock at every turn: a girder that would make it nearly impossible to put in an elevator shaft here, a stairwell that blocks it there, a platform that, if extended, would go over some private property. Then we get to the exit, and it\u2019s four extra steps down to the curb. \u201cProbably on purpose, since we\u2019re near the Gowanus Canal, to avoid flooding,\u201d Best says. I\u2019m a little dizzy from following the real-life\u00a0Escher drawing<\/a>, and I can\u2019t see where you\u2019d cut a hole to get from the tracks down to ground level. Basically, Best explains, you can\u2019t. You\u2019d need three separate elevator shafts plus a rebuilt entrance, creating a lousy experience for the passenger and a hugely expensive one for the MTA. \u201cWe\u2019re not touching any of that,\u201d he says, gesturing to those last four steps, and motions me across the street.<\/p>\n Reasons to Love New York 2025<\/p>\n See All<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n There, at the other end of the station, they\u2019re planning a pair of 90-foot-high elevator towers from scratch, one on each side of the trestle, that will go directly to the platform. Each will sit mostly on a patch of land that is now occupied by a scrapyard that is, as some document digging eventually revealed, already city-owned, rented out for so many years that the tenants don\u2019t have a copy of their lease. The agency will also probably have to buy a few square feet of land there from Lowe\u2019s, the big-box store nearby. Alongside each elevator, the MTA will also build a very tall stairwell. \u201cWe don\u2019t anticipate a lot of our customers will use that to go up \u2014 it\u2019s a haul,\u201d Best says. \u201cBut a lot of people will go down.\u201d Thus, this station will finally have two exits on each side rather than one, a good thing in any case. \u201cSpeaking with the community and compliance folks and best practices,\u201d Best says, \u201cwe came up with a design that actually was less expensive, easier to build, and served our customers better.\u201d The direct-to-platform build, one of the engineers tells me, will remove probably at least three expensive elevators from the project and eliminate a whole lot of overhead structure that would have to be built.<\/p>\n There are 472 stations in the New York subway, each of them charmingly, frustratingly unique. Decades ago, the MTA pledged to make the trains accessible, and in 1990 the Americans With Disabilities Act mandated that it happen. As of 2020, a quarter of the system\u2019s stations had been brought into compliance, which is both impressive and appalling. Impressive because changing anything in this gnarled old system is more formidable than it ought to be; shameful because at that rate (averaging maybe three per year, though they were built in fits and starts), it\u2019d take over a century to do them all. Not to mention that the elevators installed since 1990, beset by age, weather, vandalism, pee, and the general relentlessness of the New York City environment, seemed to break down as often as not. In 2002, a New York Times reporter accompanied a disability advocate<\/a> on his daily travels, and it was a life-sapping travelogue of heading to a station, discovering a busted elevator, then rolling several blocks down to the next stop and finding the same thing. Fifteen years later, in 2017, stories in both the Times<\/a> and Curbed<\/a> found that things weren\u2019t much better at all. In the late 2010s, I commuted daily past an elevator at 34th Street\u2013Herald Square whose platform exit was an absolute marvel of ruination, glass bashed in and the entire structure coated in something brown and drippy that may have been sewage. It may have been running \u2014 I never dared touch the button to summon it \u2014 but it looked as though it had been pulled up from the Titanic.<\/p>\n A decade later, there is a different story to tell. Since 2020, 39 stations have gotten full-accessibility upgrades (elevators being a large part of that), and 36 more are under reconstruction right now. Another 84 are funded under the current capital plan, to be built or under construction in the next four years or so. By 2029, the number of accessible stations will, in a decade, have gone from 115 to 272. That\u2019s more than half the system, with a binding agreement<\/a> to do all the rest (aside from about a dozen stations that have been deemed hopeless) by 2055. In the interim, the MTA says, everyone will be one stop away from an accessible station by 2029, so in the worst-case scenario, you will have to travel about ten blocks to get to one. Not ideal, but a lot better.<\/p>\n What finally broke the logjam? Money, of course, had been a lot of the holdup, because there is never enough of it, and everything in the subway system demands it. When there is finite capital, someone has to pick and choose where it goes, and it\u2019s easy enough to see why replacing failing steel trestles or train cars that break down constantly would be pushed to the front of the line. The agency began spending significantly more on accessibility around 2020, and then came congestion pricing, which has paid for vastly more of it. The toll funds a big chunk of the 2025\u20132029 capital plan, which in total includes about $68.4 billion in spending on (among other things) cars, buses, stations, signals, and expansion. About 10 percent of that will go for accessibility upgrades, a lot of that for subway elevators.<\/p>\n Then there is civic will, which both brings and follows the money. Before ascending to MTA chair in 2021, Janno Lieber helped create the construction and development division that Torres-Springer heads and gave it a mandate to get more done more quickly and less expensively. Governor Kathy Hochul, via email, tells me that the capital plan was a priority of hers when she took office that same year and that she saw improvements on this particular front as vital: \u201cThe MTA had already been making huge progress with subway accessibility, and I told them early on that I wanted them to go even faster.\u201d The culture and demands of the city have shifted, too, with a growing sense that we have coasted on our infrastructure inheritance for far too long and a widespread belief that a place this rich and vast should not be blocked off to anyone who isn\u2019t fully ambulatory. Mind you, that enlightenment didn\u2019t come out of nowhere. An array of disability-rights groups have pushed the MTA hard for a very long time<\/a>, and class-action suits<\/a> surely spurred a lot of this new action. Quemuel Arroyo, the agency\u2019s first chief disability officer, also arrived in 2021 and has pressured the agency from within to work faster<\/a>. Turning that ocean liner has been gradual, and these projects have long lead times \u2014 but five years in, the result is becoming visible.<\/p>\n The money and the mission are there now, in other words. But that does not mean these projects are straightforward. The uniqueness of our subway stations, the hellish snarl of jurisdictions that govern the systems surrounding them, and the almost comical nature of what construction crews find when they open the streets up all contribute. \u201cPeople say, \u2018Oh, why is it so expensive to make it ADA-accessible?\u2019\u201d Torres-Springer says. \u201c\u2018You just have to put it in an elevator.\u2019\u201d But the elevator, he says, \u201cis typically less than 10 percent of the budget.\u201d<\/p>\n Whereas Smith\u20139th Street calls for a two-tower solution, the underground 81st Street\u2013Museum of Natural History station, with its stacked platforms, requires a completely different one. The subterranean station on Central Park West, served by the B and C lines, was built in 1932, and it has been renovated recently enough (circa 2000) that it\u2019s in pretty good shape. Here, a new elevator has to hit both platform levels, and for that to happen, its shaft has to go down about 40 feet. The soil below the street here is eight feet deep. Below that, it\u2019s primeval Manhattan schist, half a billion years old<\/a>. In some other place and time, you\u2019d use explosives and blast it out. You can\u2019t do that across the street from the Beresford. (\u201cVery active, engaged residents,\u201d Torres-Springer says diplomatically.) After some experiments with chemical drilling<\/a>, they ended up jackhammering it out instead, 1,100 cubic yards of it.<\/p>\n What was in those eight feet of soil is considerable, too. A big steam pipe was a few feet off from where the plans indicated it should be. A lot of electrical lines had to be moved, again unexpectedly. A cast-iron water main just outside the pit needed to be replaced lest it crack. \u201cSo much of our work, in the existing stations in Manhattan especially, is relocating utilities,\u201d Torres-Springer says. Since so much of what\u2019s buried does not reveal itself until the street is opened, they inevitably result in \u201cchange orders,\u201d the dreaded amendments to the project that cost extra and slow things down. Every day spent moving that steam pipe out of the way is a day spent not drilling or pouring concrete or whatever else had been slotted in, and everything gets bumped and bumped again. (When I asked which digs have revealed the worst underground tangles, the group brings up the one that was completed a year ago<\/a> at 68th Street\u2013Hunter College.) Even some weird seasonal details factor in: At 81st, the staging area for the work crews had to be shrunk down and paved over in late November to allow the Macy\u2019s Thanksgiving Day Parade to come through, then reassembled and reopened the following Monday.<\/p>\n \n The 68th Street\u2013Hunter College elevators, dedicated a year ago, were built through a particularly gnarly bit of Manhattan substructure. There\u2019s an unexpected advantage to the agency\u2019s better-faster-cheaper push: Since so much work is going on now, the MTA can bundle the jobs, offering contractors a chance to bid on aspects of a bunch at once. \u201cIn the 2015-to-2019 plan, we got 16 stations made ADA accessible through 15 contracts,\u201d Torres-Springer says. Since 2020, \u201cwe\u2019ve got 57 stations that are in construction on 13 contracts.\u201d Some of the benefits are related to economies of scale, including geographic ones. If 81st Street\u2019s concrete pour gets delayed for a week because (let\u2019s say) a whole bunch of electrical lines unexpectedly turn up and need to be relocated, a construction crew can be shifted to a similar project, like the one now happening at 96th Street, for a week instead of waiting around. There are what Torres-Springer calls \u201ceconomies of outage,\u201d too. \u201cWe\u2019ve understood better and better that when you\u2019re giving a contractor access to a portion of a line by taking it down on the weekend, you should get as much done on that segment of the line as you possibly can. So in our next program, we\u2019re doing a station\u2019s power substations, track, structural work \u2014 flooding the zone of that area that\u2019s got an outage,\u201d so they don\u2019t have to do it again a year later.<\/p>\n Smith\u20139th requires that they build up; 81st Street requires that they go down. Broadway Junction, a sprawling multilevel station serving the A, C, L, J, and Z on the edge of Brownsville, requires both, and it\u2019s a monster of a job, requiring a new elevated structure that will span Van Sinderen Avenue. There will be not one new elevator, or a pair, but seven. Part of the dig lies under a city park, and for that to be disrupted, the land had to be clawed back from the city in a jurisdictional process known as parkland alienation, which has to go through the State Legislature. That had to be done before hiring the contractor and thus before the entire scope of what lay underneath the land was known. \u201cWe had to make some decisions before his design was complete, and that\u2019s a constraint he\u2019s having to work into,\u201d Torres-Springer says. Even something as peripheral to subway construction as the lighting in that park presented its own complication, because its electrical lines had to be moved. It\u2019s run by two different agencies, some under the Department of Transportation, and the rest \u2014 \u201crecreational lighting\u201d is the term of art \u2014 by the Parks Department. Plus Con Ed, of course. If you touch any of it, you have to get everyone\u2019s buy-in. There\u2019s also a so-old-nobody-knows-how-old-it-is sewer line more or less underneath the station, as well as an LIRR tunnel. Neither of those should move, or can.<\/p>\n \n A rendering of the rebuilt Broadway Junction station in Brooklyn. The elevator tower at center and the bridgelike structure at left will be new, and a lot of the rest of the station will be reconstructed. One seemingly subtle change in approach has actually done a lot to bring these projects into the realm of the doable: The MTA has embraced a broader idea of what\u2019s permissible under the ADA. The law is clear but also nonspecific, calling for equality of access. In the past, Torres-Springer tells me, there was a belief at the MTA that this meant equality of experience: If you rolled into the station in a wheelchair, your elevator ride had to drop you at approximately the same place as someone who took the stairs. Now the thinking is that an equivalent path \u2014 not necessarily the same one \u2014 is acceptable; you just have to make the station properly usable for everyone. As minor as this shift in thinking sounds, it opened up a lot of options, since it means that, for example, you could graft a new structure onto a station \u2014 like a separate entrance for those with physical disabilities \u2014 instead of ripping out quite so many existing stairwells. You might not need to stop the elevator at the mezzanine-level passage used for crossovers if it goes directly from the street to the platforms. But what if a disabled passenger needs to switch from the inbound to the outbound side? Well, the technology is now there to solve that differently: The MTA can, in an instance like this, rig the OMNY pass to allow an extra free trip through the turnstiles. The MTA calculates that its direct-to-platform approach has saved it $250 million.<\/p>\n None of this will matter much if the elevators keep breaking down, and that, everyone admits, is a perpetual challenge after the effort of building is met. It\u2019s easy to chalk up the frequent out-of-order problem<\/a> to slipshod maintenance, although Torres-Springer pushes back on that, talking up the effort the agency does make. \u201cWe actually get a very high standard from New York City Transit elevator maintainers, but maintenance and cleaning is a big priority for us in a way that it hasn\u2019t necessarily been in the past.\u201d Inevitably, anything that\u2019s constructed underground and essentially outdoors \u2014 from vandalism to salt runoff \u2014 requires a degree of toughness you\u2019d never see in, say, an office building. There is one clever aspect of these contracts, at least, that encourages accountability: The builders of the elevators are responsible for keeping them running for at least the first 15 years after they\u2019re installed. \u201cThey know that they\u2019re on the hook for maintaining it. \u201c<\/p>\n For whatever it\u2019s worth, I stopped by that 34th Street nightmare on my way home the other day. It\u2019s been completely rebuilt, and as I approached it, the car arrived, silently, at the platform level. It smelled okay.<\/p>\n Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism.
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\n If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the December 15, 2025, issue of
\n New York\u00a0Magazine.<\/p>\n