Halmar has finished the accessibility upgrade at the 161st Street-Yankee Stadium subway complex in the Bronx, and all of the station’s new elevators are running. It’s the first major milestone on the MTA’s first transit public-private partnership. The ADA 13 Stations program, valued at about $965 million, adds or replaces 34 elevators across 13 New York City subway stations, and Halmar expects to finish the other 12 in early 2027.
Halmar Infrastructure Development announced the milestone Oct. 15, and Construction Dive reported it Oct. 19, citing an MTA document for the $965.26 million program value.
Inside the MTA accessibility P3
The deal is design-build-finance-maintain, a first for the MTA, which normally buys station work through design-bid-build or design-build contracts. Halmar ID is the developer and financial sponsor through its concessionaire, Elevated Accessibility Enhancements LLC, which holds the prime contract. Halmar International builds the work on a turnkey basis, Forte Construction handles civil work, Dewberry Engineering is the designer and Otis Elevator Company supplies and installs the elevators. Halmar’s parent is Italy’s ASTM Group.
The 13 stations split into two kinds of work. Five are replacement sites, where new cars go into existing shafts and machine rooms. Eight are installation sites that need new shafts, structural changes and new machine rooms, and that’s where the schedule and cost risk sit. Halmar also lists utility relocations in dense streets, work inside active stations and coordination with NYC DOT among the job’s hard parts.
Phasing Yankee Stadium around the baseball season
The complex serves the elevated 4 line and the underground B and D lines. Three elevators serving the below-grade IND platforms went first, with the elevated IRT station following. The layout links a primary street-level elevator to the lower mezzanine and a second car up to the upper mezzanine and platforms, giving one continuous accessible route. Halmar says the work was scheduled around peak demand, game days included.
The financing and the 15-year maintenance tail
Financing came through a dual-tranche taxable municipal bond structure, a privately placed short-term tranche plus a broadly marketed long-term issue, backed by committed equity. Halmar didn’t name lenders or disclose bond amounts, so the cost of the private capital against a conventional MTA bond can’t be checked from outside.
Maintenance is what makes this a P3 and not just a fast design-build job. Halmar’s team maintains all 34 elevators for an initial 15-year term, with payments tied to availability and reliability KPIs. Subway elevators have a long record of outages, and the MTA is betting that paying for uptime fixes something procurement alone didn’t.
The bundling is the part other owners will study. Big New York programs still tend to move one contract at a time, like the Port Authority’s 13-year George Washington Bridge rehab, now eight projects into 11. If the last 12 stations close out on schedule in 2027, expect the bundled accessibility P3 to show up in the MTA’s next round.