Work Begins on New Entrance to Grand Central Madison...but It Won’t Open for 18 Months

A new entrance to Grand Central Madison, the MTA’s $11.1 billion station that sits a quarter mile underground, is being erected at Madison Ave. and 45th Street. It will carve out a passageway that will cut through a new officer tower now being built and make the gleaming but under-utilized station ADA compatible.

The entranceway won’t be ready for another 18 months, however, but it will at least open long before the new officer tower which is expected to take four years to build.

The MTA and the developer BXP, formerly known as Boston Properties, broke ground on Oct. 1 for this new accessible entrance which will be part of a new office tower that will sit on a plot that once held the office tower that the tri-state rail agency used as its headquarters from 1979 to 2014 before moving it to Brooklyn.

The MTA hopes more passengers opt for the East Side station to ease pressure on Penn Station where the vast majority of LIRR passengers now disembark.

Currently only 70,000 daily passengers, roughly a quarter of the nearly 280,000 passengers who used the Long Island Railroad in 2023, opted for the East Side station.

The new entrance will help speed passengers to the new station platforms that are 14 stories below street level, sitting underneath the original Grand Central station.

The new entrance will be part of a new office tower that sits on a plot that once held the building that MTA used as its headquarters from 1979 to 2014 before moving it to Brooklyn.

The space dated from the First World War and was known as the Equitable Trust Building before 1979. The new building over the entrance will be known for now only as 343 Madison.

In 2020, BXP was selected to redevelop the site on Madison Avenue and demolition began in February 2021 to begin construction of the entrance, which started on Oct. 1 with the symbolic digging by MTA and local officials. BXP has agreed to build the new ADA compliant Grand Central Madison entrance in advance of the new skyscraper’s completion. The MTA will own the land on which the building is situated; this will mean a revenue stream expected to generate more than $1 billion in ground rent revenues and real estate taxes, dedicated to the now-underfunded MTA capital program.

“Over time, the revenue will support the MTA capital program and some of it will go to the City of New York–that’s the sharing of transit-oriented development and we are hoping this becomes more of the norm,” MTA Chairman Janno Leiber said at the groundbreaking.

This new entrance to Grand Central Madison’s Long Island Rail Road Concourse will bring the total to six street entrances: 42nd Street and 43rd Street through One Vanderbilt, at 47th Street inside 383 Madison Avenue, two elevator-only entrances in freestanding buildings built by the MTA at 44th Street and 48th Street and now 45th Street.

The MTA has planned two new direct street entrances north of 47th Street, giving even faster access to the LIRR East Side Terminal. Also at the ceremony, East Side Assembly District Member Alex Bores noted the significance of the new 45th Street entrance:

“Transit only works if it works for everyone,” Bores said. “This new, ADA-accessible entrance, built without spending any MTA funds, will make it even easier for all New Yorkers to get around the State. Having projects like this that allow us a public-private partnership to bring people together to deliver accessibility is really important.”

What about the new building surrounding the entrance? Right now, it’s an empty space. BXP has big plans for the block-long site. BXP will handle development, property management and leasing of the property of 343 Madison. After a scaling back from the original plans, the building will offer 750,400 square feet of office space, designed by the architectural firm of Kohn Pedersen Fox. They are the same firm that crafted One Vanderbilt, also in the immediate Grand Central area. In conjunction with the MTA, BXP and its minority partner in this project, the Government Pension Fund of Norway, signed a 99-year ground lease with the MTA with the requirement of construction of a direct access entrance to Grand Central Madison, expected to open sometime in 2026. This is in advance of the building’s opening, whose construction, once started, could take up to four years. Should BXP not find an anchor tenant for the office space, it has an option to terminate the main lease by July of 2025, and be compensated for the cost of the new constructed entrance to Grand Central Madison.

Richard Farley, SVP at Handler Real Estate Organization, an NYC commercial real estate broker, noted in an exclusive chat with Our Town, “The Grand Central Area commercial sector is really developing and it’s an exciting addition to this market. Look at neighborhood building One Vanderbilt—it was leased prior to development. I’m confident that BXP will find a significant tenant to lease. In these times, tenants will find a building friendly to their needs, and being close to LIRR access will enhance 343 Madison’s appeal to businesses.”