Coconut Grove Metrorail station closed for four months

After spending a year upgrading the Douglas Road Metrorail station, county transit officials have learned from the experience and say they can make over the Coconut Grove station in just four months – but only by shutting it down and having trains bypass it until May.

The Coconut Grove station was fully closed Jan. 21 as the developers of the adjacent Grove Central project remake the Metrorail stop at their own $6.2 million expense, which was one of the terms of allowing the transit-oriented development.

“The Underline project is coming through and the Grove development team has renovated the station at the same time and tying into the Underline,” said Javier Bustamante, the transit department’s assistant director of project management and support services. “It’s all on their dime.”

Meanwhile, developers Terra and Grass River are supplying a shuttle bus to the nearby Douglas station as well as a dedicated Freebee for passengers who have missed the most recent bus trip, Mr. Bustamante told the Citizens’ Independent Transportation Trust last week.

After Mr. Bustamante listed all the elements of the station project, trust member Harry Hoffman asked dubiously, “You’re saying all of this is going to be done in approximately five months?”

Four months, Mr. Bustamante replied, after saying that the Douglas station work earlier took a year of work part time and the transit department learned that a full shutdown would work far better.

“Remember, we are operating 19 hours of the day, so the Douglas team had weekend and night work only … the last train passing by at 12:45 a.m., crew starts to work” and the tracks are deenergized, he said. “By the time they really got to work it’s now past 1 a.m. or so and they have to be out of the way by 4 a.m., so that small three-hour window you didn’t get a lot.” It took “almost a year in work.”

On the full shutdown in the Grove, he said, “it’s an inconvenience for four months but maybe it won’t be an inconvenience for 12 months.”

Trust member Paul Schwiep was late to the meeting – because to attend he normally takes his scooter to board the Metrorail in Coconut Grove and he forgot the station would be closed. “I think, Mr. Bustamante, listening to your presentation, I’m sold” on the full-time shutdown to do the work.

One reason is that the private developers are doing the station work themselves. “They have got an incentive to go quick” to get their residential and commercial tenants access to the station, Mr. Schwiep said.

Grove Central has 170,000 square feet of retail space, 402 residences in a 23-story residential tower, and 1,295 parking spaces.

The Coconut Grove station is getting a new elevator and escalator, new flooring on the ground and upper platforms, two new restrooms, painted interior columns, clean stainless steel materials, new granite benches on the upper platform instead of the old wood benches, glass block and glass panels on the elevator shafts instead of dark predecessors, new lighting, and new hardscaping and landscaping.

As the old 40-year-old elevator and escalator systems are ripped out for the new, Mr. Bustamante said, the county is saving the parts to repair its old hardware elsewhere because new parts aren’t available any longer.