How Cost of Train Station at World Trade Center Swelled to $4 Billion
With its long steel wings poised sinuously above the National September 11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan, the World Trade Center Transportation Hub has finally assumed its full astonishing form, more than a decade after it was conceived.
Its colossal avian presence may yet guarantee the hub a place in the pantheon of civic design in New York. But it cannot escape another, more ignominious distinction as one of the most expensive and most delayed train stations ever built.
The price tag is approaching $4 billion, almost twice the estimate when plans were unveiled in 2004. Administrative costs alone — construction management, supervision, inspection, monitoring and documentation, among other items — exceed $655 million.