Contract A37752 opened bids in October 2023, drew nine contractors, and named Empire Control Abatement Inc. the apparent low at $6,342,620 — this paper reported the tab at the time. It never became an award. Eleven addenda and roughly ten months later, MTA Construction & Development put the identical scope of work back on the street as contract A37752R, and a different firm came out on top: M Bhuiyan Construction Co. Inc., apparent low at $6,172,565.90 when bids opened August 6, 2024 — about $170,000, or 2.7 percent, under the first-round number.

The scope is unchanged from the original: rehabilitation of 20 street-level subway stair entrances across 11 stations in Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens — raised landing pads, ADA-compliant handrail and guardrail extensions, new globe lights, and sidewalk regrading, the same flood-hardening work this paper covered when the job first bid. The rebid's contract documents lay out real quantities behind that scope: 678 conduit runs for the light fixtures, nearly 1,000 linear feet of sidewalk sawcutting, roughly 120 cubic yards of sidewalk removed and replaced, and hundreds of feet of crack and spall repair. One item was deliberately left unquantified — the railing repair and replacement scope — after a bidder objected during the addenda process that manufacturers wouldn't price repair work without a stated quantity. The MTA's answer put that estimating risk on the bidder, not the agency.

The rebid isn't a quiet redo. The job is phased into three milestones — 190, 230 and 328 days from notice to proceed — with $500-a-day liquidated damages riding on each one, and a hard access rule: only one stair per platform side can be closed at any station at a time, so riders always have a way in and out. It also has company. A separate, concurrent MTA contract — A37628, the Sandy Resiliency EBCS program — is working eight of these same eleven stations at the same time, which means two contractors' crews coordinating in the same stairwells. And because several of these stations carry landmark status, the specs include a dedicated historic-preservation section plus hazardous-materials removal for lead, mercury and PCBs before any of the flood-hardening work can start.

None of this is an award yet — an apparent low bidder is not a winner until MTA C&D finishes reviewing the bid. But the pattern is worth watching for any contractor who bid the original A37752 and walked away when it stalled: a job that doesn't convert to an award doesn't disappear. It comes back, sometimes cheaper, and the firms that stayed ready to requote were the ones in position to win it the second time.

This work sits inside the MTA's broader flood-resilience push: the agency's Climate Resilience Roadmap update commits $223 million of the 2025-2029 Capital Plan to stormwater protection at subway entrances, after more than 200 stations have taken a heavy-rain hit since 2007. Twenty stairs down, many more likely to come.