Oculus (World Trade Center Transportation Hub)

At the World Trade Center site, the architect Santiago Calatrava built a railway station that looks as though it might take off. The World Trade Center Transportation Hub, known for its main hall, the Oculus, opened on 3 March 2016. Calatrava's starting image was a bird released from a child's hands: from the street, white steel ribs sweep up and outward from two long arches, like the wings of a dove caught at the instant of flight. It is one of the most expensive stations ever built — its cost ran to around four billion dollars — and it has been both admired and fiercely criticised for that extravagance.

Inside, the effect is of standing within the skeleton of an enormous white creature. The ribs rise about 50 metres over a floor of white Italian marble, and along the spine of the roof runs a skylight of roughly 100 metres that can open to the sky. The building is oriented to catch the light: every 11 September the skylight is opened for 102 minutes, the time between the first plane striking the North Tower and the collapse of the second tower. Up close the ribs are not as smooth as they seem from afar; a fireproof coating gives them a faintly textured, stucco-like skin. About a third of the structural steel was made in a factory in northern Italy.

The station continues a long history underground. The Hudson Terminal opened here in 1909 for the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad; its successor, the World Trade Center PATH station, opened in 1971 and was destroyed on 11 September 2001. A temporary station opened in 2003 while the new hub was designed and built. Today PATH trains run from here to Newark and Hoboken, passageways link the hall to several subway lines and the Fulton Street complex, and a shopping centre fills the galleries — but the reason to come is the view up from the marble floor, a few steps from the memorial pools.

Getting there

The Oculus is in Lower Manhattan's Financial District, next to the 9/11 Memorial. The nearest airfield, Teterboro (TEB), about 16 km away, serves mainly private and business aviation; most visitors arrive through Newark Liberty (EWR), JFK or LaGuardia. From Newark Airport the AirTrain and an NJ Transit train connect to Newark Penn Station, where PATH trains run directly to the World Trade Center station. Within Manhattan, several subway lines stop at the hub or at Fulton Street, connected by underground passages.