Fourth Avenue-Ninth Street Subway Renovation View Full Caption

PARK SLOPE — Five years after renovations started at the Fourth Avenue-Ninth Street subway station, MTA officials will give a long-awaited update on the $11 million remodeling at a public meeting on Thursday.

The Park Slope Civic Council is hosting the 7 p.m. meeting, where MTA's Andrew Inglesby, assistant director of government and community relations, is expected to present the update.

The black netting and scaffolding that covered the station's Fourth Avenue bridge for years was recently removed, and locals are hoping to hear that the project is nearing completion.

The Civic Council recently wrote to the MTA with a long list of questions about the station's future, said S. J. Avery of the Civic Council's Forth on Fourth Avenue committee, which aims to improve Fourth Avenue.

Civic Council members want to know whether MTA plans to improve the lighting beneath the dark Fourth Avenue bridge and when an elevator will be installed in the stair-filled station, where the F, G and R lines converge on underground and above-ground tracks.

The Civic Council also hopes to hear about plans to move shops into the vacant retail spaces on the station's ground level. There are spaces for six stores there, and MTA said in 2012 that it expected to lease the spaces in 2013.

MTA agreed to give Thursday's update after the Civic Council held a public demonstration in November to draw attention to needed upgrades at the station, which serves 13,000 commuters a day, according to the Civic Council.

The Civic Council had originally planned to decorate the station with props showing what the transit hub would look like with better lighting and signage. But MTA asked the group to move the installation to a different location, saying it needed to remove scaffolding on the day of the event.

"Simply put, we deserve better,” said Forth on Fourth Avenue co-chair Grace Freedman before the November demonstration. "It's time to open a constructive community conversation with the MTA and elected officials about livable street amenities that could improve the station without big ticket capital expenses. And we need a timeline for planned work."

The renovation project is 80 percent complete and is scheduled to be finished in March 2015, according to the MTA website.

An MTA spokesman declined to comment.

The Park Slope Civic Council's meeting with the MTA is scheduled for Feb. 5 at 7 p.m. in the lounge of the Novo building, 343 Fourth Ave. near Fifth Street.