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Old South Ferry Station reopens, restores 1-line service from Lower Manhattan from Pavement Pieces on Vimeo.

It is out with the new and in with the old at the South Ferry station.

Built in 1905, the old platform station was built higher above ground and suffered less damage from Hurricane Sandy than the new station.

The century-old station has been closed since the new South Ferry Station opened in 2009, but was pressed into service last week to accommodate the more than 10,000 daily riders in Lower Manhattan whose commutes were disrupted after the new South Ferry station suffered massive flooding from Sandy.

“You had to wait or you had to switch at another station,” said Laurie Ferrari of Tottenville, Staten Island. “Here you can just grab the 1 (train) and go.”

Metropolitan Transportation Authority workers quickly began work on restoring lighting and repainting station walls after Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced last month that service on the 1 line would be restored in Lower Manhattan.

“As MTA New York City Transit assessed the extent of damage to the new South Ferry station, it became clear that the time necessary to repair it would be too long a period to deny our customers a direct link to lower Manhattan,” said MTA Interim Executive Director Thomas F. Prendergast in a press release.

Riders who normally took the 1 to or from South Ferry station had to walk four blocks to the nearest 1 line stop on Rector Street, or two blocks west to the 4/5 Bowling Green station. The rush of commuters to the 4/5 lines packed subway cars, with people often fending off others to cram onto the trains during rush hour.

“Having to walk to the 5 train was very inconvenient, especially during the cold weather,” said Gary Dennis of West Brighton, Staten Island.

The recently refurbished South Ferry station that underwent a $545 million renovation and expansion was inundated by Sandy’s storm surges that filled 15 million gallons of salt water into the station, coating walls with a blue-green residue and corroding switch boards, relay switches and circuit breakers. Two window panels on the mezzanine level were also blown out onto the tracks.

Trains began pulling into the station as of 5 a.m. Thursday morning, and include a new connection point between the new station mezzanine and the old South Ferry station, allowing transfers between the 1 train and the R train’s Whitehall Street station.

MTA officials estimate it will take at least two years and cost $600 million to fully restore the South Ferry station. Sandy caused nearly $5 billion in damages to New York subways, according to the MTA. (http://).

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Construction debris litters a closed platform at the Smith-9th Street subway station in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn. (Photo by Nick DeSantis)

Since mid-January, the morning commute at the Church Avenue station in Kensington, Brooklyn has resembled something like an Olympic event.

Commuters disembarking from southbound trains sprint up the stairs, hurdle the concrete mezzanine, and fling themselves down the opposite side in a breathless attempt to catch a departing northbound train without spilling a drop of coffee.

This athletic maneuver isn’t a normal subway transfer. A new construction project is forcing some riders to backtrack into Brooklyn, delaying their daily commute.

Thanks to the recent launch of the MTA’s $275.5 million Culver Viaduct rehabilitation, straphangers from the Fort Hamilton Parkway and 15th Street-Prospect Park stations in Brooklyn have been deprived of northbound train service until May. Riders near those stations now have two choices: they can ride backward two stops to access northbound service at Church Avenue, or walk an extra half-mile in the cold to Park Slope’s busy 7th Avenue station.

The viaduct repairs have also knocked out Manhattan-bound F service at the Smith-9th Street station, spurring Red Hook riders to attempt similar athletic feats.

Damon Sager, 36, of Park Slope, was so annoyed by the prospect of a convoluted commute that he opted out of the daily race. He asked to work from home instead.

“I have not bought a monthly metro pass, and I won’t until the end of this,” Sager said while waiting for a southbound train at 15th Street-Prospect Park. “So they’re losing money from this customer.”

When Sager does commute, he rides a southbound train backward two stops before crossing over at Church Avenue and heading north. The new transfer adds approximately a half hour to his routine, he said.

Despite the inconvenience for riders like Sager, the structural overhaul of the 77-year old steel and concrete viaduct, a bridge which lifts trains over the Gowanus Canal, is badly needed. Poor drainage deteriorated its shell, causing it to shed chunks of concrete.

As a stopgap measure, the MTA wrapped the undercarriage in black netting to catch falling debris. The city closed a playground underneath the bridge to protect children.

At the top of the viaduct, riders were often left scrambling for cover from the weather on the Smith-9th Street platform.

“When it rained, the holes in the ceiling would leave everyone exposed to the elements,” said Cozbi Cabrera, who owns a shop on Court Street, a block from the station.

Half-measures proved insufficient to plug the leaks, so the MTA began the full-scale repairs that cause the daily race at Church Avenue.

Gene Russianoff, a spokesman for the Straphangers Campaign, a transit riders advocacy group, said the crumbling viaduct is part of a huge backlog of improvement projects. He noted that since 1982, the agency has spent $55 billion to repair subways and buses, but many current repairs are part of a “triage system.”

“If they could have found another way to make the repairs, they would have,” he said. “It’s a sincere attempt to inconvenience passengers as little as possible.”

Sincere attempt or not, many subway users in Park Slope and Windsor Terrace are now faced with the annoyance of a prolonged – and unpredictable – trip to work.

David Galarza, a Windsor Terrace resident, knows better than most how precarious his commute is. On Feb.4 , signal problems at the Bergen Street station knocked out F service between Church Avenue and 2nd Avenue on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. With all of his nearby stations out of service, Galarza couldn’t even backtrack to get to work, and was forced out of the subway entirely.

“People were pretty much left to their own devices,” he said.

The nuisance will persist well after the first phase of repairs is complete. In May, Smith-9th will close entirely, and next fall, the service changes in Windsor Terrace will reverse, creating delays in the evening.

Craig Hammerman, District Manager for Community Board 6, maintained that the lengthy project is worth the delay, since most commuters will benefit in the long run.

“What we’re getting now is much more comprehensive than what we would have gotten had the MTA just continued to make surface changes,” he said.

Subway riders wait for trains on a temporary platform at the 4th Avenue-9th Street subway station in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn. The station is one of two on the Culver Viaduct, a steel and concrete bridge currently under repair by the MTA. (Photo by Nick DeSantis).

Galarza appreciates those efforts and has adjusted to his new routine. But like many of his neighbors, the icy first few weeks of the project have proven unkind.

“I’m glad that they’re making these changes, but I just wish that some of the changes had taken place in weather that’s a little friendlier,” he said.

Culver.mp3

Reporter Nick DeSantis talks to Joseph Touraty, the owner/manager of a pizzeria across the street from the Smith-9th Street station in Gowanus.

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John Raimond displays the hand-made hook he uses in lieu of a more traditional prosthetic attachment in Whitehall Ferry Terminal in Manhattan Raimond, who lost his arm and eye in a car crash two years ago, wears the hook while posing for pictures in in the heated terminal during the coldest winter months. (Meredith Bennett-Smith / Pavement Pieces).

As commuters and tourists hurried through the Manhattan side of Whitehall Ferry Terminal yesterday, “Captain Jack Sparrow,” aka John Raimond, greeted bundled passengers with an iron hook, home-made nose ring and a one-eyed sneer worthy of the fictional pirate hero’s Hollywood alter ego, actor Johnny Depp.

During the winter months, Raimond, 40, of Staten Island, greets ferry passengers here three to five days a week. Posing for pictures with tourists and locals alike, Raimond’s pirate get-up springs from events that hit closer to home than the average street performer’s costume.

After a heavy night of drinking and a fight with his girlfriend in May 2009, Raimond blacked out behind the wheel and ran his vehicle into a ditch. Nine days later, he regained consciousness in an intensive care hospital bed.

“I opened my eyes and I don’t have my left arm,” Raimond said.

While Raimond took the loss of his limb in stride, the loss of his job was harder to swallow. Unable to continue welding commercially, he stumbled across his current profession while watching the film Pirates of the Caribbean.

“I thought to myself, I now have one arm, and I now have one eye,” he said.

One self-welded hook prosthetic and $400 worth of Party City apparel later, the Whitehall Ferry Terminal Captain Sparrow was born.

But Raimond, who has an official permit to act as a pirate, is not the only performer to frequent the warm confines of the Whitehall Terminal. The entryway also plays host to a tin man and golden statue, according to Maria Baluena, of Staten Island, a cashier at one of the terminal’s food counters.

From behind a counter stacked with pizza rolls and hot pretzels, Baluena watches the waves of commuters pass by the various performers as well as a tight-knit contingent of homeless, the terminal’s semi-permanent population.

“[The homeless] all sit over there,” Baluena said, gesturing to a corner of the terminal far from the eyes of the police officers and drug sniffing dogs, yet close to the public bathroom stalls. “There’s the fart guy he farts a lot, and Ritchie, and the Russian guy who repeats the same thing over and over again, and the Pepperoni Lady.”

The group of twenty or so swells during the winter months, Baluena said, while going largely undisturbed by the terminal staff unless they cause a disturbance by throwing food on the floor or feeding the pigeons.

While the homeless keep a low profile, performers who share the warm terminal space with them often attract onlookers from the departing and arriving crowds.

“Excuse me, Mr. Pirate,” said the young woman, interrupting Raimond’s statuesque posing and nudging her toddler forward. “Can he take a picture with you?”

“Argh!” Raimond replied smiling, bending down on one knee, but still managing to dwarf the little boy.

The two walked away without depositing anything in the tip jar hanging from the pirate’s rope belt. But Raimond said he derives much more personal satisfaction than actual revenue from his stints as a swashbuckler.

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