A four-billion-dollar train station shaped like a bird leaving a hand, which is either the most beautiful transit hall in America or the most expensive shopping mall. Free.
What it is
Santiago Calatrava’s World Trade Center Transportation Hub, opened in 2016, twelve years late and roughly $2 billion over budget, at a final cost of around $4 billion. It connects the PATH trains to New Jersey with eleven subway lines and the buildings around the site, and it does that through a single white ribbed hall 350 feet long with no interior columns.
The exterior is a set of steel ribs curving up and outward from a spine, which Calatrava described as a child releasing a bird. Critics have described it as other things — a stegosaurus, a rib cage, a very expensive porcupine — and the cost overrun made it a permanent argument in New York about public money and architectural ambition.
Whatever the argument, the room is remarkable. It is white marble and white steel, lit from a skylight running the whole length, and on a bright morning it is one of the few genuinely uplifting interiors built in New York this century.
The skylight
The spine of the roof is a retractable skylight. It opens each year on 11 September, aligned so that at 10:28am — the moment the North Tower fell — a shaft of light falls the length of the hall. Calatrava designed the alignment deliberately. It is opened on other warm days too, but the anniversary is the intended use.
What is in it
Around 100 shops, making it in practice a large upmarket shopping centre — Westfield operates the retail. There is an Apple Store, an Eataly, and the usual run of fashion.
This is the thing that irritates people most: a memorial-adjacent piece of civic architecture that is also a mall. Both things are true at once and you can decide how you feel about it while walking through.
Getting around from here
The Oculus is the connective tissue of the whole site. Underground passages run from it to One World Observatory, to the 9/11 Memorial plaza, to Brookfield Place across West Street via the Winter Garden bridge, and to the Fulton Center subway complex to the east.
In bad weather you can cross a large part of Lower Manhattan without going outside, which is a genuinely useful thing to know in February.
The other free thing nearby
St Paul’s Chapel, part of Trinity Church, is directly across Church Street and is the oldest church building in Manhattan. It survived 11 September intact and served as a relief station for eight months afterwards.
More Other Places
Coney Island
A wooden roller coaster from 1927 that is a designated landmark and still runs, a boardwalk, a free beach and the hot dog contest. Forty minutes on the subway.
Green-Wood Cemetery
478 acres of Victorian garden cemetery that was the second most visited attraction in America after Niagara Falls in the 1860s. Free, and a flock of green parakeets lives on the gate.
Bronx Zoo
265 acres, around 6,000 animals, and the zoo that led the shift from cages to habitats. Pay what you wish on Wednesdays.