Bids open tomorrow at 2 p.m. on MTA contract A35355 -- the facade rehabilitation of the 4th Avenue-9th Street station in Park Slope, the historic viaduct station carrying the F and G over 10th Street. The estimate range is $10 million to $50 million. One housekeeping item first: Addendum No. 1, issued August 27, reissued the entire general-requirements volume, replaced ten drawings, and answered 26 bidder questions -- and a bid that does not acknowledge it can be rejected.
The scope, from the drawings: roughly 500 feet of the station's south flank gets rebuilt. All the brick veneer west of the westerly control tower comes off and goes back as matching historic brick over new waterproofing, drainage mat and stainless anchors. Every window in the band -- 63 of them -- is replaced. The limestone coping comes down, gets repaired and reset. The two brick control towers flanking 4th Avenue get cleaning only: about 6,500 square feet of brick and 650 of coping, each.
The station is individually listed on the National Register, and the documents treat that seriously. Three mockups -- brick sample, window, and a rebuilt wall panel -- each sit for up to 30 days of state historic-preservation review. Acid cleaning is banned outright; pressure washing tops out at 500 psi through a fan tip. The new windows are custom aluminum replicas of the steel originals, and their color is not picked from a chart: a conservator samples the old paint, layer by layer, and the earliest finish becomes the new color. Anything salvaged of historic value goes to the Transit Museum's curator.
The steel rules are just as strict, because the wall hangs on a live railroad. No flame cutting. Field welding is essentially off the table. Rivets come out by drilling, temporary supports get designed by a licensed engineer to transit standards, and the track profile gets verified against the agency's own geometry car. Between the work zone and the trains, the contractor builds shields rated for a 200-pound-per-square-foot working load.
The schedule is the bid. This is an A+B contract -- price and time both count, capped at 580 days -- and the station never closes. Street-side work runs weekdays 7 a.m. to 3 p.m.; anything needing flagging or service diversions moves to nights and weekends; and work inside the station is flat-out prohibited during rush hours. The low bidder gets three business days after the opening to produce a full CPM phasing schedule in Primavera and defend it at a qualification hearing. The B in A+B is not a number you make up on bid day.
Two pricing details from the addendum worth underlining. First, the sidewalk shed: the existing shed is the MTA's to remove -- the contractor coordinates with 30 days' notice and keeps sidewalk protection continuous -- which settles a question multiple bidders asked. Second, the quantity risk: there are unit-price allowances for structural concrete and hidden steel repair, but coping-stone patching and the deeper spall repairs price into the lump sum -- and the drawings say the defect mapping is based on visual inspection only. The wall will tell you what it really needs after you open it.
The field is deep: the plan-holder list runs about three dozen firms, from restoration specialists to heavy primes -- Navillus, Tully, Whitestone, T. Moriarty & Son and Structural Preservation Systems among them. Goals are 15 percent MBE, 15 percent WBE and 6 percent SDVOB, and the contract carries the MTA's Enhanced Utilization Credit: MWBE firms with little or no prior MTA work count for an extra 50 percent toward the goals. No project labor agreement; prevailing wage applies. Award is expected in October.
The job rides on our board as RFI-000046. For the trade watching from outside the bid: this is what a National Register facade job over a live railroad looks like on paper -- and why the range between $10 million and $50 million is not the agency hedging. It is the wall keeping its secrets until somebody opens it.