The long-delayed Fulton Transit Center may get a major infusion of Federal funds as part of President Obana's economic stimulus program.

An article in today's edition of The New York Times by William Neuman said that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority expects to spend $497 million in such funds to complete the center which is located on the southeast corner of Fulton Street and Broadway across from St. Paul's Chapel and a few blocks south of City hall.

The funds would permit the authority to go ahead with plans to erect a glass building atop the transit hub but the article indicated "it was not clear if the final design would include the project's signature feature, a cone-like skylight, known as an oculus, that would channel daylight into the lower areas of the station."

The article said that Elliot G. Sander, the executive director of the authority said that the "oculus would add about $40 million to the cost," adding that the center is "a highly visible portal to a modern transportation complex."

He spoke at a hearing of the New York State Assembly yesterday and said he estimated the authority would get $1.5 to $2 billion for the economic stimulus bill now under consideration in Congress.

The Fulton Street project was initially financed by the Federal government with $750 million that earmarked for the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan and is designed to "simplify a tangle of subway stations," but "costs kept rising and last January the authority said that while work would continued on the underground portions of the project, it could not longer afford to move ahead with the above-ground structure" that had been designed by the noted British architect Nicholas Grimshaw and James Carpenter.

The lead editorial in today's edition of The New York Post said that "today, the site is a wind-swept, trash-littered vacant lot whose only difference from Ground Zero is that al Qaeda had noting to do with creating it."

It quoted Mr. Sander as remarking that "People have been worried that we were going to leave a hole in the ground or construct a simple subway entrance instead of the iconic structure that the community was expecting."

Work on the transit hub that would link 12 subway lines at Fulton Street began in early February 2005.

Work to reconfigure the maze of ramps and passageways within the station itself includes the new Dey Street Pedestrian Concourse that will be built under Broadway and westward below Dey Street. The concourse will have its own "headhouse" (entrance) on the southwest corner of Broadway and Dey. The much anticipated pedestrian link, about 29 feet in width, will connect Fulton Center trains with the R/W line at Cortlandt Street and the World Trade Center transportation hub -- home to the PATH and, possibly, a direct rail line to regional airports.

Begun after the tragedy of September 11th, the Fulton Street Transit Center was designed to be a grand transit station in the heart of Lower Manhattan. Numerous properties were acquired by the MTA and 145 businesses were displaced, some by eminent domain.