By Carla Zanoni
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
INWOOD — The Bloomberg Administration’s $3 million renovation of a 1930s Art Deco substation on the far west end of Dyckman Street has been delayed until the fall, because the scope of work needed to renovate and stabilize the building is larger than previously anticipated, city Parks Department officials said.
Work on the New York Central Railroad Substation No. 10 came to a halt approximately two months ago when workers discovered that several of the beams for the roof had deteriorated. Crews now have to obtain a new work order for that part of the job because the original construction plan did not involve replacing the beams, a process that is expected to take months.
The building now sits with locked fencing around its perimeter, allowing only groups of pigeons to enter.
“The contractors cannot proceed without this so they haven’t been on-site since these conditions were discovered,” Parks Department spokeswoman Trish Bertuccio wrote in an e-mail.
The building, which has been vacant since the 1980s and sits between the two overpasses for the Henry Hudson Parkway, is being renovated to include public restrooms and potential community space.
In 2007, Assemblyman Adriano Espaillat and then-City Councilman Miguel Martinez fought to convert the space into a Dominican cultural center with a Latino-style restaurant instead of City Councilman Robert Jackson’s suggestion that the space become offices for the Parks Department.
The fate of the community space is still undecided.
A contractor has so far removed the roof and two stories worth of soil that once enclosed the building, demolished the interior transformers and generators, re-graded the building by removing four feet of concrete slab, and installed a new boiler room, Parks Department officials said. A new roof, windows and doors still need to be installed in addition to bringing service utilities to the building.
Safety remains an area of concern in the area as the facility sits beside the Hudson River pathway, which has received many community complaints of illegal activity. Reports state that homeless people lived in the building as late as 2003 in 2006, the Manhattan Times reported that a dead body was found in the building.
But Bertuccio maintains that the building is protected and should not be a problem for the community.
“Securing the building exterior should prevent vandalism and trespassing before construction picks back up later this summer,” she wrote.
