You know the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building and the other icons of New York City. Add the Oculus to the list.
If you have been in Lower Manhattan in the area of the World Trade Center in the last few years, you have seen it take shape and likely have wondered what it was to become. It’s that 160-foot-high, white, weird winged thing designed to represent a dove being released into flight by the hands of a child. Other critics aren’t as kind with their descriptions.
It is, first and foremost, a train station, a $4 billion train station that has been both praised and reviled by architectural, fiscal, political and public entities.
It is where the Port Authority Trans-Hudson, or PATH, trains from New Jersey and 11 New York City subway lines meet, and where other links to other transit systems eventually will be made.
But first, the name. Oculus. By definition, it means “eye.” If you’re lost trying to figure out how a train station in the shape of a flying dove becomes an “eye,” you are not alone. However, one architectural feature of the structure does, with a little imagination, resemble an eye.
In any case, the Oculus is the opulent crossroads of the rail lines, and its attached shopping mall will become either a mecca for tourists and shoppers or a monument to overindulgence.
Call it Oculus (the symbolic, signature structure) or call it the World Trade Center Station (the transportation element), or call it the Westfield World Trade Center (the shopping mall inside), it is hands-down and wings-up the most radical architectural structure in Manhattan. Sorry, Guggenheim.
From the time those ribbed “feathers” started to take shape in 2008 until it opened in August, the Oculus has drawn the eyes of tourists and ire of many critics.
The layout can be confusing, and downright confounding. The Oculus is an octopus of concourses that sprawl over, alongside and under sidewalks and streets on several levels.
The vast “mall” portion of the building is designed to accommodate 113 tenants, and many of the expected upscale shops, from A (the flagship Apple Store) to Z (Zaro’s Bakery) are up and running within its 365,000-square-foot space, the size of about seven football fields. More than two dozen restaurants, from fast-food chains to swanky N.Y.C.-style dining spots, fill out the retail roster.
The developers look at the location as a neighborhood which is itself home to about 60,000 permanent residents and more than 230,000 people who work there. Those numbers will be supplemented by the millions of tourists who will pass through every year.
Construction at the World Trade Center continues unabated.
At the neighborhood’s muscular core are the four WTC skyscrapers, including One World Trade Center, the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere, at 1,776 feet.
The Oculus is the pulse of the complex through which arteries of rail lines and veins of people flow, but embracing all of that is the silent spiritual aura of the 9/11 Museum and Memorial at its very heart.
Email Charles J. Adams III: weekend@readingeagle.com.
