Best of 2006 Awards
Jamaica Station Portal Structure and LIRR Platforms
AWARD OF MERIT: Mass Transit
 Coordination is critical on New York City construction projects. But when the site is one the busiest transportation hubs in the country, coordination gets particularly complex – even by local standards.
Teamwork was paramount in building the new “Portal” structure and other features that now link three busy stations in Queens – one serving the AirTrain, which ferries passengers to John F. Kennedy International Airport, and the others serving the Long Island Rail Road commuter line and New York City Transit’s subways and buses. The Portal finally transforms what all three systems call Jamaica Station into a true multimodal transportation hub.
The project team had to perform detailed construction planning and staging in order to allow continuous service at Jamaica Station, which serves 300,000 riders on 700 trains daily. The Portal and LIRR platform work was the second phase of the overall $350 million effort to incorporate the AirTrain terminal, which opened in 2003, into the station. The newer work, which finished in September, constitutes more than half of the total project budget.
“This was a complicated project,” said one of our judges. “They had to work around the systems still in operation.”
The major component of the effort was the Portal, a new covered structure to ease transfers between the AirTrain system and the existing LIRR, subway, and bus facilities. The project scope also included demolition of an LIRR concourse and transfer corridor.
Other major project elements included replacement of five 1,000-ft. long LIRR platforms and canopies; removal and replacement of the existing Westerly Bridge, which had been another partial passenger circulation link; rehabilitation of the Sutphin Boulevard entrance and subway mezzanine; installation of new high-capacity escalators and elevators; and upgrades to lighting, power, communications, and signage.
The platform reconstruction was a giant task. On a typical weekend, the team would deconstruct a predetermined length of the existing platform and canopy down to existing piles and rebuild it, all during offpeak hours. Service outages had to be scheduled more than three weeks in advance on a maximum of two platforms at a time, and the team had to return all platforms to use at the end of an outage with complete overhead weather protection.
The team used rail as the primary access for heavy equipment and materials as well as removal of debris. The build team purchased flat cars, locomotive cranes, and hi-rail cranes to form work trains that were pulled by locomotives provided by LIRR and stored in one of its yards.
Key Players
Owner-CM-Designer: Port Authority of New York and New Jersey
Construction Manager: Bechtel Infrastructure
Designer-Engineer: Lizardos Engineering Associates; Severud Associates Consulting Engineers; SIA; Sam Schwartz PLLC
General Construction Joint Venture: Perini Corp.; Tutor Saliba
Painting: Fine Painting
Portal Steel: Hyundai
Elevators-Escalators: Kone
Precast Platforms: Jersey Precast
Stainless Steel: Airflex; UAD Group
Electrical-Mechanical: RWKS Transit
Drywall: New England Construction
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