For months, commuters have been traveling through the almost complete Fulton Center, the transit hub conceived for Lower Manhattan in the wake of the September 11 attacks. But much of the $1.4 billion complex was off limits, hidden by temporary partitions and construction tarps as final construction and systems testing wrapped up. But the tarps and partitions have come down and nearly a decade after the first construction contracts were awarded, the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), the operator of New York City’s subways, declared the station officially open as of November 10.

At its most basic level, the project’s primary aim was to bring order to the jumble of stations for the subway lines that crisscross each other in spaghetti fashion in the city’s financial district. It was confounding to transfer among the lines since they were originally built, some more than a century ago, by competing entities. “There was just loads of friction in the system,” explains Craig Covil, a principal at engineering firm Arup, the project’s prime design consultant.