Second Avenue Subway

So that whole Second Ave. subway thing, it’s been around for a while.

Sitting on the top of this post, courtesy of the Modern Mechanix blog, is an image taken from a magazine that hit the streets in October of 1931 when Franklin D. Roosevelt was New York’s governor and Jimmy Walker was our fair city’s mayor.

The rendering of Second Ave. of the Future is part of a larger article — available here — about the streets of the future. The streets of New York’s future in 1931 were havens for cars with pedestrians earning their own separated walkways shielded from eight-lane highways.

But the roads are just the beginning. It’s what is underneath them that holds tantalizing glimpses of optimism 75 long years ago. City planners were working on the Second Ave. subway as early as 1920. The El was due for replacement, and the Public Service Commission had drawn up a plan that included a Second Ave. subway. Nearly ten years later, in 1929, the Board of Transportation announced plans for the subway. The Board planned to award contracts from 1930 through 1935 with a target completion date of 1941 and sections opening up before the.

Talk about optimism. In October, the nation’s economy came crashing down, and with it, the City’s best hope for a Second Ave. subway. New estimates predicted a 1948 opening date, but money was scarce. As we all know, the city is still waiting for a subway line that many think will never come.

It was in the midst of this planning that the Modern Mechanics and Inventions magazine published this feature, and what a grand vision it is. While our Second Ave. subway line will feature two tracks and no express service, this hypothetical Second Ave. subway from an age of optimism features four tracks and two suburban commuter rail lines. The two outer tracks right below street level would serve local stations while the outer two tracks of the bottom four would operate as express trains along the avenue.

Through it all, if you look closely enough, the train cars in 1931 still look pretty familiar today in 2008.

Meanwhile, as the Second Ave. subway slogs its way to completion, imagine a city that had built this subway line decades ago as these anonymous magazine authors assumed. Imagine a city with that extra line and maybe one or two others in the outer boroughs.

We’ll never get to know that New York City with six train tunnels running under Second Ave. Hopefully, we’ll get to know something of a Second Ave. subway, but as these long-forgotten New Yorkers who dreamed of that future 77 years ago could tell us, don’t count your chickens before they hatch. We need that subway; we want that subway; and we’ve been saying that since the Hoover Administration.

When the MTA hinted earlier this week that budgetary problems and concerns about inflation were going to drastically alter the Fulton St. Transit Hub plans, I figured the Second Ave. Subway would not be spared the proverbial knife as well. When MTA CEO Lee Sander said that MTA Capital Construction was looking to trim $1 billion from a few projects, I knew some aspect of the Second Ave. subway would have to go. Luckily, the cuts won’t be too bad.

The cuts, you see, will eliminate a planned third track in the northern reaches of the planned tunnel, according to Pete Donohue of the Daily News. This third track, viewed as a luxury so that functional trains could bypass hypothetical stalled trains does not appear in the project’s Finale Environmental Impact Statement, and I have to believe that, due to the influx of federal funds, the Second Ave. Subway dodged a bullet.

According to the report, the number of stations in the subway line will thankfully stay the same, but this cut basically eliminates the possibility of any future express service along Second Ave. For a long time, subchatters and Second Ave. Subway proponents have debated the need for a third and fourth track under Second Ave. Why build a subway that’s only local, they argue?

I’ve long believed that the Second Ave. subway can and will succeed with just local stops. These stops are, after all, better spaced than the IRT stops from 100 years ago, and because the Second Ave. Subway will use longer trains than the IRT lines in Manhattan, exits from the stations can cover a wider range of blocks. For example, while the train will stop at 72nd St. and 86th St., thus bypassing the popular 79th St., passengers can exit from those stops at 74th St. and 83rd St., respectively. Walking those few blocks to the middle should be easy.

But New Yorkers long accustomed to false starts and sudden stops won’t see the project delayed. As Sander has stressed, the Second Ave. Subway will become a reality, and New Yorkers can thank the feds for that one. Because the Federal Transit Administration has promised funds for the project, the MTA will be able to construct Phase 1 of the Second Ave. Subway. It may not have those extra tracks; it may not be as opulently ornate as the MTA hopes. But it will provide much-needed relief for the East Side, and it will arrive this time.

Construction on the Second Ave. subway has cut into sidewalk space along the avenue. This shot looks south at the southwest corner of 94th St. and Second Ave. (Photo courtesy of The Launch Box)

It’s no small feat to construct a subway. Old photos — available in The City Beneath Us — clearly show the distruptive nature of underground construction. Today, businesses along Second Ave. are learning that subway construction comes with a price, and many of them aren’t too happy.

According to a recent story in the New York Post, store owners along Second Ave. are losing substantial amounts of revenue because of the construction, and these business owners aren’t too happy with the MTA’s and the City’s responsiveness so far. Kevin Fasick, Dan Kadison and Patrick Gallahue have more:

Shop owners on Second Avenue between 91st and 96th streets complain that their sidewalk space has been more than cut in half by guardrails and concrete barricades that are keeping customers away. “It cut down my traffic tremendously,” said Marcelo Ronchini, who owns Nina’s Pizzeria on Second Avenue between 91st and 92nd streets. “I’ve lost 20 percent of my revenue.”

John Ng, manager of Hokkaido restaurant, at the corner of East 94th Street, said, “Business has dropped at least $20,000 a month. We’re trying to wait it out. What can we do?”

And Vicky Schreier, owner of Rainbow Ace Hardware at 94th Street, said that her business, too, was down and she wanted the city, along with the MTA, to come up with ideas to help the shops. “There is a significant drop in business,” Schreier said. “We understand it’s good for New York, the good of people, but it’s not good for us.”

In six years when the subway is open and access to the Upper East Side is streamlined, these business owners will be doing a brisk business. But in the world of local stores, six years can be an eternity, and that $20,000 month-to-month decline in sales could be the difference bewteen life and death.

The Post reports that a coalition of shop owners have met with the Department of Small Business Services and the MTA. Assemblyman Jonathan Bing hopes to come to an agreement on some low-interest loans or tax-free zones for those businesses suffering from the construction. Street-level disruptions up and down Second Ave. will be an ongoing issue throughout the construction of the Second Ave. subway, and it would of course be best for everyone involved to find a happy medium to what could be a debilitation problem to businesses in the area.

Yesterday afternoon, I covered the MTA’s announcement of a $1.3-billion federal grant for the Second Ave. subway with a look at how we’re simply repeating the past here. The Second Ave. subway’s tortured history is filled with federal grants that have never turned into a physical subway line.

But this time, as one commenter pointed out, things are different. We’re not in the midst of a Great Depression or a recession. Economic factors are seemingly on our side. So the line must be coming our way, right?

Well, I’m no longer as sure of this certainy as I was a few days ago. Notably, Americans have been hearing an increasing rumble about a recession heading our way. With material costs soaring, construction project budgets are on the rise, and the Second Ave. subway is no exception. Furthermore, the MTA is well aware of this problem.

In fact, it seems to me that the MTA is gearing up for another round of Second Ave. disappointment. Let’s revisit Saturday’s Public Engagement Workshop. During two presentations, MTA officials mentioned the Second Ave. subway in less than encouraging tones. First up was MTA CEO Elliot “Lee” Sander. During his talk on the state of the MTA finances, he boastfully mentioned Phase 1 of the project, currently underway along Second Ave.

But when it came to the other parts of the line — the parts that would actually make it a full subway line instead of just an extension of the Q — Sander said that the MTA is “contemplating other phases of Second Avenue.” Meanwhile, a few hours later, Linda Kleinbaum, the MTA deputy executive director for administration, in her talk on capital improvements, continued to stress only Phase 1 of the project, barely mentioning the other parts.

I didn’t take that as a good sign. I was particularly concerned with Sander’s use of the loaded word “contemplating.” I guess a bunch of MTA officials are sitting around a room thinking about how they don’t have the money for the rest of the line and will have to continue to hope that the federal government is willing to kick in another $6 billion or so over the next 14 years. That’s nothing too pleasant to contemplate.

Meanwhile, more than once over the last few days, MTA officials have mentioned rising costs of construction materials as a concern of theirs. It came up twice in different presentations on Saturday, and in the article in yesterday’s Times discussing the federal grant, William Neuman wrote about those costs as well.

According to Neuman, the MTA has already added to the project’s real estate budget and had increase its construction outlay by $54 million. This is in addition to a tunnel-digging contract that ended up being $17 million more than what the MTA had originally estimated. Already, the MTA is well over $80 million past initial budget estimates. No wonder it’s taken 80 years and counting for this subway line to materialize.

So here we are in 2007 and MTA officials are talking about opening the line in 2014, one year past the initial 2013 date. We’ve got seven long years of budgetary wrangling and economic uncertainty. We’ve got seven long years for this project to once again fall apart, and it sounds like MTA officials are hedging their bets.

I’m one of the vocal supporters of this project, but I fear for its future. While three stops on the Q are better than nothing at all, those stops shouldn’t be considered a victory in themselves. If the line doesn’t run from 125th St. to Hanover Square, we haven’t made much progress. Right now, circumstances don’t appear to be on the MTA’s side. History in New York does indeed have a funny way of repeating itself.

There’s an old saying in New York, “Everything new is old again.” And today’s announcement concerning the $1.3 billion heading the MTA’s way for the Second Ave. Subway certainly fits that bill.

First, the news, courtesy of William Neuman and The New York Times:

The long-dreamed-of Second Avenue subway will take another important step toward becoming a real thing of concrete and steel today, as the federal government plans to announce that it has formally approved $1.3 billion in financing for the project’s first phase.

Transportation Secretary Mary E. Peters said in an interview that the money would be paid out over the next seven years as construction progresses on the subway’s first leg, which will have stops on Second Avenue at 92nd, 86th and 72nd Streets and at 63rd Street and Lexington Avenue.

This federal approval was simply a formality after a September announcement that the FTA had given this $1.3-billion expenditure the greenlight. A rubber stamp approval from the Bush Administration was simply a formality.

While this news is exciting for New Yorkers long awaiting a subway line with a tortured past and future, Jeremy Olshan on his Unchanging Times blog notes that this story sounds remarkably similar to the news New Yorkers have heard over the last few decades. Olshan goes back into the archives of The Times and digs out this article from 1974.

In that article, 33 years ago, The Times reported that the feds were going to fund a Second Ave. subway with the expectation that the line would be built. If that rings a bell, it’s because Secretary Peters said the same thing today. “It will be very good news to people in the area that this long-planned, on-again-off-again project will finally be completed,” she said.

Of course, as we know in the 1970s, nothing went right for the city or the MTA, and here we are again, 30 years later, repeating history. Will the outcome differ? Only time will tell, but most New Yorkers aren’t holding their collective breath waiting for the subway just yet.