Grand Central’s Barriers To Be Given Face-Lift
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The unsightly barricades outside Grand Central Terminal will be replaced with hundreds of bronze-finished bollards by this summer, Metro-North officials said yesterday.
The Jersey barriers and concrete cubes currently in place were added in the weeks after the September 11, 2001, attacks to prevent terrorists from driving a car bomb into the station.
With a $10 million grant from the Department of Homeland Security, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority last spring awarded John Civetta and Sons a contract to install new, more attractive barricades. The 600 new bollards are designed to allow easier passage by pedestrians while maintaining solid protection from vehicles, a Metro-North spokesman, Dan Brucker, said.
The bollards, which contain large steel cylinders, will be cemented to the sidewalk.
The terminal has been operating in its current form since 1913. Since Metro-North took control of the station in 1994, it has undergone extensive renovations.
Truck and car bombs have been one of the favored terrorism methods by insurgents in Iraq. A truck bomb that slammed into the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad in 2003 killed 17 people and injured more than 100 others. According to a briefing diagram from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, a small box van can carry up to 10,000 pounds of explosives with a lethal blast range of 300 feet.
The updating of perimeter security is the latest of several security moves at Grand Central. Last summer, the MTA announced it had installed real-time technology that can detect chemical and biological agents in the air. Several New York Police Department K-9 units are deployed in the subways. The MTA also awarded a $212 million contract to Lockheed Martin in August to install smart cameras in subway stations. The cameras are designed to detect people loitering or entering restricted zones, as well as unattended packages and other patterns. The MTA also is spending millions of dollars in federal grants on strengthening bridges and tunnels and on training MTA police to be able to spot suspicious activity quickly.
