The new World Trade Center transportation hub, an area destroyed during the 9/11 terrorist attacks, opened Thursday to criticism that it cost taxpayers twice than originally estimated and was a decade late, said the
New York Daily News.
But the soaring, birdlike Oculus structure, the target of much of the scorn, was hailed by its creator, Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, despite its $4 billion cost.
"This is a gift to New Yorkers from our hearts," Calatrava said, per the Daily News. "There's not many public spaces as special as this. We did something positive for generations to come."
WCBS-TV said the new hub connects Port Authority Trans-Hudson trains to New Jersey with 11 New York City subway lines and ferry service and is expected to handle some 200,000 visitors daily.
"This was a very successful mall before 9/11 and we have no doubt that it's going to be a very successful shopping center," Jessica Lappin, president of the Alliance for Downtown Manhattan, told WCBS-TV.
Michael Kimmelman, writing for
The New York Times, called the hub a "boondoogle," contrasting it to when Grand Central Station was built in New York City.
"Grand Central spurred a building boom that transformed the surrounding blocks and the city's economy," Kimmelman said. "This new hub is shoehorned into an unfinished office park in Lower Manhattan whose development it has complicated, not hastened — while the whole area has been evolving into a livelier live-work neighborhood despite what's happening at the World Trade Center, not because of it."
The hub was widely panned on social media as it opened to the public this week.