I’ve wanted to do an update on the reconstruction of Greenwich Street (the project runs from Chambers to Barclay) and when I reached out to the Department of Design and Construction, they offered to give me an in-person tour. I find it all mind-boggling, so I am doing my best here to understand what is going on despite the fact that this is well above my paygrade.

So first, the short answer. As of now the current schedule is:

• Anticipated End Date Murray to Barclay: August 2026
• Anticipated Start Date Murray to Chambers: October 2025
• Anticipated Project End Date Murray to Chambers: November 2026

As you may recall, work started here in May 2022 on what was scheduled to be a five-year project. Back the DDC thought they would have Barclay to Murray paved over and restored by May 2024, but the project has been pushed back by the stew of city and non-city agencies that control what lies beneath the streets.

This project began as a Department of Transportation roadway reconstruction project, but the city decided it was time to readdress the quick fixes made after 9/11 on the watermains — some of which date back to the 1880s — enlarging the scope by about 90 percent, the DDC said. So they are doing the whole shebang: replacing the roadbed, the curbing, the watermains, and moving around all the other utilities in the roadbed, while some of them also make improvements.

“The idea is to not come back here for a century,” said Ian Michaels, the DDC’s director of public information. “This is the most the city can do to fix a neighborhood.”

The project’s resident engineer, Peter Roloff, explained the project, and I am doing my best here to regurgitate: The most complicated part: ConEd has gas, electric and steam pipes and cables that run there, and they have a substation underneath 7 World Trade Center. The Empire City Subway, a wholly owned subsidiary of Verizon, owns the pipes that Verizon runs its cables through. Both of those companies have to coordinate with the city’s projects, and it seems those schedules don’t line up. ConEd doesn’t always know what it will find when it gets underneath there, plus then the city has to wait for their work. When we toured in August, the DDC had been waiting since April for the company to turn the power off on the cables so they can work around. But ConEd wouldn’t turn off the power until the summer heat calmed down — the usage is so high they don’t want to accidentally ding a cable and shut it down.

So there goes a good five to six months down the drain.

Plus the DOT wanted to keep Greenwich open to traffic for the entire project, so that complicates everything even further. “We did this project on Staten Island, and we would do a block on a week. It’s a little different here,” said Walkman Wong, the DDC’s assistant commissioner for Manhattan infrastructure and construction.

But wait, there’s more. The steel pipe under there that ConEd has to replace was installed at the turn of the century — the last century (those are the rusted pipes below). “They have no idea what they are going to find till they open it,” said Roloff. Plus the cables from the substation are extremely high voltage and have to be turned off one by one — they are not easy to relocate (those are the large cluster of black cables coming from the south). (Gas mains — the green ones — can go anywhere — they are bendable. Water mains have to be as straight as possible.)

ConEd is NOT replacing those old steam pipes, however — will follow up to see why not, since that says to me there will be more construction here eventually…

There were two water mains under Greenwich — they were built in redundancy on purpose. The Department of Environmental Protection is replacing those 20-inchers that have aged out. (The pipes stacked up on the surface are the new 20″ watermains.)

And Verizon is installing a lot of empty pipes for the future – so they don’t have to redig. Those are PVC pipes buried in concrete.

I was impressed that the DDC was willing to walk the site with me — but as Wong said, “We love what we do and we love explaining the problems.”

(From left to right, Ashok Dhaduk, senior inspector from Tectonic Engineering; Peter Roloff; Walkman Wong; and Phil Stafford, DDC community construction liaison.)

A little postscript: Roloff told me that when they were digging up Peck Slip in 2007, they found a wooden water main held together with leather straps. It was about an inch in diameter and, according to the archeologist they brought in, carried water from Central Park to Lower Manhattan.