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At the construction yard of Grace Industries' Westside Highway segment sit relics of New York City's infrastructure past. Crews have dug up cobblestones, track sections, timber sheeting and myriad unidentified utilities that are decades old. The relics are slowly but surely giving way to what eventually will be a $380-million reconstruction of Manhattan's notorious Westside Highway.
``We have to do it as we go along,'' says Paul Duarte, supervisor for the Whitestone, N.Y., firm. At the same time, Grace's crews are driving 200-ft-deep piles for five tidegates while keeping an eye on the tides of the Hudson River. Grace also is relocating sewers below and automobiles above ground, as the firm races to complete its $53-million chunk of the reconstruction.
The contract is one of seven that make up the overhaul of the highway, also known as Route 9A. It is a five-mile effort that designers and officials say represents a melding of urban planning and community involvement to make the process move almost as smoothly as vehicles are expected to travel when work ends in late 2001.
Phoenix-like, the new 9A is rising out of the debris of two collapses. The first occurred in 1973, when a truck fell through a portion of the original elevated Westside Highway that skirted the Hudson River from Battery Park Place in lower Manhattan up to West 59th Street. The second was the crushing defeat of an ambitious plan for a $2-billion Westway of Interstate status with room for rail service and a park that would extend 1,000 ft into the river on new fill.
Environmental concerns, including endangering the striped bass, killed the project in the...