Michael Horodniceanu, who oversaw Transit Megaprojects, dies at age 78
Michael Horodniceanu, who helped complete massive, seemingly endless transit projects in New York City as president of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s capital construction, died June 22 at a hospice facility in the Bronx. He turned 78.
His son Oded said the cause was pancreatic cancer.
From 2008 to 2017, Dr. Horodniceanu oversees hugely complicated construction projects costing New York billions of dollars. He tried to get them to become favors to the city’s transportation system rather than boondoggles.
“There are always problems on a construction site”, Dr. Horodniceanu told the MTA board in 2009, after a gap between the platform and the track that was about an inch too wide delayed the opening of a more than $500 million South Ferry subway station. “It is not my job to bring the problems, but the solutions.”
There were five ambitious projects led by Dr. Horodniceanu: East Side Access, a plan to extend the Long Island Rail Road to Grand Central Terminal; an extension of the No. 7 train to the Hudson Yards on Manhattan’s Far West Side; the Fulton Transit Center, a major redesign of a downtown subway interchange that made switching between nine train lines less of an ordeal; the new subway station at South Ferry; and the Second Avenue subway, which Upper East Siders had dreamed of since the Great Depression.
The last four were completed under the supervision of Dr. Horodniceanu. Grand Central Madison, the new LIRR terminal below Grand Central Station, opened in January.
Dr. Horodniceanu, a figure of genius with a mostly white beard who favored flashy bow ties, was often in the hot seat when construction problems arose. Those problems ranged from run-of-the-mill delays and cost overruns to more unusual problems, such as excavation explosions that shattered windows on the Upper East Side in 2012.
Perhaps the most persistent problem Dr. Horodniceanu faced was the extremely high cost of transportation construction in New York City, which a 2017 New York Times survey found to be the highest in the world.
That investigation also found that the Grand Central Extension project employed about 200 more workers than the approximately 700 it needed, and that those additional jobs had not been reported to the public when the authority discovered them in 2010.
“Nobody knew what those people were doing, if they were doing anything,” Dr. Horodniceanu in 2017 to The Times. He said the surplus workers had been laid off, but no one knew how long they had been employed.
“They each got about $1,000 a day,” he said.
When the new terminal finally opened this year, the agency estimated the total cost at $11.1 billion, or more than six times the average cost of similar projects elsewhere.
At least one construction delay that Dr. Horodniceanu faced arose far beyond the five boroughs: problems with diagonal elevators designed in Italy specifically for the No. 7 train station at Hudson Yards, which officials hoped to open in 2013, before Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg leaves office.
The elevators were made by an Italian company, but project managers wanted software and components from American manufacturers.
The components functioned separately, but the lift failed a test in Italy after being fitted that summer, and long European vacations prevented work from resuming for some time. After experiencing other delays, the extension finally opened in 2015, at a cost of $2.4 billion.
In 2017, Janno Lieber, a real estate manager who had helped rebuild the World Trade Center complex, replaced Dr. Horodniceanu as president of the MTA’s capital projects.
Dr. Horodniceanu sent the authority’s board a suicide note praising the two subway expansions and the opening of Fulton Center and the new South Ferry station as a “grand slam of mega projects”.
“Working together, we have improved the lives of many New Yorkers and forever changed the face of public transportation in New York City,” wrote Dr. Horodniceanu. “We have made history.”
Michael Filip Horodniceanu (pronounced ho-rode-nee-CHA-noo) was born in Bucharest, Romania, on August 4, 1944, to Filip and Clara (Hascalovici) Horodniceanu.
In 1961, the Horodniceanus followed a wave of Romanian Jews emigrating to Israel after World War II. They settled in a suburb of Tel Aviv, where Filip worked as an administrator for the national health care system and Clara became an accountant for Elite, an Israeli chocolate company.
After graduating from high school in Haifa in 1963, Michael served in the Israeli army. During his time there, he met Bat-Sheva Maltzman at a party. After retiring from the military, he attended what is now Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, while Ms. Maltzman studied political science and developing countries at Tel Aviv University. They married in 1968.
He graduated in 1970 with a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering and then moved to the United States, settling in the Forest Hills neighborhood of Queens. He received a master’s degree in management from Columbia University in 1973, and five years later completed a doctorate in transportation planning and engineering from what is now New York University Tandon School of Engineering.
After completing his doctorate, Dr. Horodniceanu joined some of Tandon’s colleagues at Urbitran, an engineering, architectural and planning firm, where he worked full-time in the 1980s. He also taught at Tandon and at Manhattan College in the Bronx.
In 1986, Mayor Edward I. Koch appointed Dr. Horodniceanu as traffic commissioner. In that position, he oversaw the city’s traffic enforcers and parking meters.
After David N. Dinkins became mayor in 1990, Dr. Horodniceanu returned to Urbitran where he served as president and general manager. In 2008, AECOM, an infrastructure consultancy, bought Urbitran, and Dr. Horodniceanu left the company to work for the transportation authority.
After leaving the MTA, Dr. Horodniceanu returned to Tandon, where he became a professor of civil and urban planning and the inaugural chairman of the Institute of Design and Construction Innovation Hubwhich aims to facilitate communication between different professions in order to make construction projects faster, more cost efficient and more sustainable.
Besides his son Oded, he is survived by his wife; another son, Eran; a grandson; and three granddaughters. He lived in Forest Hills.
Before work on the Second Avenue subway line was completed in 2011, one of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s tunnel-boring machines, the behemoths that eat through miles of shale and other rock in Manhattan, broke down. named Adi, after Dr. from Horodniceanu only grandchild at the time.