People walk the length of the World Trade Center Transportation Hub on Thursday. | AP Photo/Mark Lennihan Port leaders formally celebrate opening of WTC transportation hub

On Thursday afternoon, nearly three months after it opened, the white-winged, $4 billion World Trade Center Transportation Hub finally got itself a formal opening ceremony, complete with bagpipes, a Spanish starchitect and a new line of rhetoric from the leaders of the agency that made the facility hub a reality in the first place.

“Expensive?" asked Port Authority chairman John Degnan, to knowing titters. "Yes. Controversial? Perhaps. But hasn’t that been true in the history of art always? I think so.”


The center of the transportation hub is a ribbed oculus with a long slit down the middle that opens to the sky. Through that skylight, the hundreds of celebrants at the Oculus on Thursday could glimpse One World Trade Center and the ongoing construction of 3 World Trade across the way.

That the transportation hub even got an opening ceremony represented something of an achievement, since it came after a good deal of equivocation on the part of Port Authority leaders over whether the very over-budget structure merited that sort of thing.

“This oculus is indeed art, but with a practical purpose,” Degnan said.

Some 50,000 PATH riders a day now use the station that feeds into the Oculus. That's many times less than use Grand Central Terminal, the Port Authority Bus Terminal, or Penn Station.

The Port predicts those numbers will grow, in part because Westfield is building a mall in the transportation hub, and in part because as of Thursday, the hub connects to nine subway lines at Fulton Center, via a just-opened passageway called the Dey Street Connection.

Thanks to that connection, lower Manhattanites huddled against the cold or dodging the rain will now be able to walk underground from Brookfield Place on Manhattan’s west side to William Street on the East Side.

"Coincidentally, this past week was the 133rd year anniversary of the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge, another controversial, expensive project that took 14 years to build and then became the economic engine of our region,” said the Port’s outgoing vice chairman, Scott Rechler. "And I would predict that this transportation hub will do the same for lower Manhattan.”

The hub has won some rave architecture reviews, but it has critics, too. Most inconvenient among them is Pat Foye, the Port Authority’s executive director, who has dubbed the hub a “symbol of excess” for its dramatic cost overruns and comparative lack of utility.

Foye took part in Thursday’s ceremonies, mutely.

He stood on the dais but had no speaking role.

Perhaps operating under the “If you can’t say anything nice” principle, he slipped out after the event before the media had the chance to hound him.

That oculus is “testimony to the importance of art in the life of a nation,” Degnan said.