Bids opened Wednesday at 2 p.m. on contract A35355, the facade rehabilitation of the 4th Avenue–9th Street station in Park Slope — and the turnout tells you something about the restoration market right now. Twenty-two contractors put in numbers on one brick-and-windows job.

The apparent low bidder is MPCC Corp. Because this is an A+B contract — bidders submit a price and a schedule, and the award math counts both — the number that ranks the field is the evaluated bid: MPCC's is $9,267,773, made up of a $6,537,773 gross-sum price plus the dollar value the MTA's formula assigns to its promised schedule. The next bidder on the evaluated math, J-Track LLC, came in at $10,627,500. The highest of the twenty-two: $25,539,816. Low to high, the field spread across nearly a factor of three — on the same drawings.

Put the low price next to the MTA's own advertised estimate range and it gets more interesting: the agency told bidders to expect $10 million to $50 million. The apparent low price came in around three and a half million dollars under the bottom of that range. Either MPCC sees a leaner job than the agency priced, or it wants this one badly — and with twenty-one other bidders behind it, plenty of firms wanted it.

None of this is an award yet. The bids now go under review, and this contract puts real hurdles between apparent low and signed contract: the low bidder owes the MTA a full Level-2 project schedule within days of the opening, and a qualification hearing follows. If the low number doesn't survive review, the evaluated ranking is the order the agency works down.

For the twenty-one firms that didn't get it, the tab is still worth reading — it's a published price map of what facade restoration on a live transit structure costs in this market, bidder by bidder. The job rides on our board as RFI-000046, and the full opening results are on the Bid Results tab and the MTA's contracting page.