Monday 16 Jan Touring

 It was MLK day so the traffic wasn't as heavy as usual and the weather was good. 

We took advantage of this to do a hop on hop off bus tour of downtown (south of 50th Street). 

We got off at the 9-11 memorial area. The memorial is in the first image (from the internet).

Before we saw the memorial and the 9-11 museum, we looked in on the oculus which is a structure that covers the NYC terminal station of the Port Authority Trans Hudson (PATH).

This station had just been fully completed in December 2016 (with a final connection to the NYC subway system) but the Oculus superstructure had been completed in March 2016. 

The Oculus is a one of kind structure.  The cost of design was, by itself, about $500M (this is partly because it was designed several times in response to various important people's opinions).  The structural beams are huge. The skylight at the top is over 350' long and the cost of construction was about $1B.  It would have been more but the original idea of a retractable skylight and some other enhancements were not implemented.


The cost of the PATH station, the Oculus and the underground connections to the subway and other local destinations was about $5B. This makes it the most costly transit station yet built.  

The final image (from the internet) shows the Oculus from the outside.