BOOK REVIEW

Celebrating Big Dreams and The Second Avenue Subway

By Phyllis Eckhaus

“Big-league” (pronounced “bigly”), “huge,” “great,” “giant.” Our president’s superlative-laden size obsession, coupled with his seemingly humongous hatred, make me shrink with wariness — I imagine him pushing the nuclear button just because it would make the biggest, most catastrophic KABOOM.

And as Trump seeks to disassemble checks-and-balances, the rules of war, civil rights, the welcome mat for immigrants and refugees, the East Wing, the federal government itself, I feel my pride in America crumble. Our prez has kneecapped my capacity to dream big dreams, not least because he’s turned graft into an Olympic sport and transformed his whole cadre of billionaires into supervillains so openly malevolent they make comic book bad guys look like amateurs.

The Big, Beautiful New York City Subway

All this is to say that I found the innocent boosterism of Dan McNichol’s big, beautiful book on the Second Avenue subway weirdly restorative. This lushly-illustrated coffee table tome, Second Avenue Subway: Building New York City’s Most Famous Thing Never Built, is a paean to big dreams and big infrastructure, a welcome reminder that big isn’t necessarily bad.

And, indeed, much of what makes New York City uniquely wonderful is directly tied to its size and scale. McNichol begins by evoking the city’s incontrovertible bigness, which as a Villager, I sometimes forget. If New York City were a country, he says, its wealth generation would surpass Canada’s.

He attributes our city’s vitality directly to “one of the world’s engineering marvels,” our subway system. With 472 stations — the most of any subway system on the planet ─ it is “democracy on steel wheels … the most neighborhood access.”

McNichol’s breezy text provides plenty of context, but it’s his engineering details that really sing. His co-author, Bill Goodrich, is the infrastructure engineer and ex-MTA honcho who oversaw Phase 1 of the Second Avenue subway ─ the 2016 completion of the four-station Q line spur from 63rd Street to 96th Street. That nine-year effort is the core of this book and it’s thrilling ─ even to a near-Luddite like me, who can appreciate the massive complexity, challenge, and suspense that coursed through this megaproject like electricity. 

Beyond the scale, what’s startling food for thought is the sense of decency, teamwork, and civic responsibility by the people in charge of Phase 1. One can’t help but obsess over what it might take to reproduce these leadership qualities.

Delay, Delay, Delay

First some history. Former Civil War surgeon Rufus Gilbert conceived the Second Avenue El (elevated) in 1870, hoping to relieve the awful overcrowding on the Lower East Side. But grand civic visions are routinely thwarted by problems of money and politics. Gilbert’s idea didn’t come to fruition till 1880.

In 1904 the city got its first subway line. It extended from the gorgeous and now defunct City Hall station — where Mayor Mamdani chose to be sworn in — to the Upper West Side. This fast and classy mass transit was clearly superior to the coal-burning, soot-spewing elevated trains, at eye level with second story apartment dwellers. The Second Avenue El was torn down in 1942. The Third Avenue El was demolished in 1956. The Upper East Side and East Harlem became transit deserts, relying on the wildly overcrowded Lexington Avenue Line.

Promised but never delivered, the Second Avenue subway began to resemble the punchline to a bad joke. The Depression put the kibosh on 1928 plans to build underground from Houston to the Harlem River. Robert Moses — a highway fan and mass transit foe — further backburnered those plans. Not until Moses lost power, his empire subsumed into the new Metropolitan Transit Authority, did blueprints for a Second Avenue subway reemerge in 1968.

Supported by the first federal grant to provide sustaining support for mass transit, in 1972 the Second Avenue subway broke ceremonial ground at 102nd Street in East Harlem, with then-Governor Nelson Rockefeller and then-Mayor John Lindsay wielding a pickax and shovel respectively. By the late seventies, with the city facing bankruptcy, the project ─ which had caused chaos and destruction throughout 28 city blocks ─ had been abandoned. An East Village tunnel was backfilled; tunnels in Chinatown and East Harlem were entombed.

The two companies that had jointly won the bid to build the tunnel in East Harlem — one of them founded in 1848 – went belly up thanks to geology. What was supposed to be bedrock was discovered to be “bull’s liver,” a silty liquifying soil too soft to be easily excavated.

An Adventure Story

Decades later, during Phase 1, engineers devised a way out, with an elaborate system of underground pipes and street level refrigeration systems that circulated salt brine chilled to minus 13 degrees Fahrenheit to freeze the bull’s liver. This freed them to deploy “The Beast,” their rocket-like tunnel boring machine (TBM). The Beast, 22 feet wide and 675 feet long, comparable in power to an F15 jet, was built to bore through bedrock. Reading about it — and seeing photos — is great fun.

McNichol quotes Goodrich to describe the challenge and excitement of deep rock tunneling, with all the unknowns underground and his awareness — like a space explorer — that he was witness to an environment almost no one else will see. The torque of The Beast is another adventure: “Starting up the TBM feels like an earthquake,” a tunneler observed.

The megaproject was mega noisy, sometimes spurring engineering improv and stunning sensitivity. For example, a project manager came up with a solution when faced with 200 irate elderly residents of a Second Avenue nursing home, fearful they would never sleep again. To tamp down the booming noise of cars bouncing concrete deck panels against steel girders, he improvised rubber gaskets under each panel.

McNichol tells of project phone calls to especially sensitive community members, alerting them in advance to dynamite blasts. Recipients included the parents of a child receiving chemo and the mom of a neurodivergent adult prone to violence. In the hospital-heavy Upper East Side, blasts were scheduled not to interfere with surgeries.

Impressively, the head honcho, MTA Capital Construction President Michael Horodniceanu, appears to have approached his role as community liaison with genuine imagination, inviting community members to Saturday underground tours he and Goodrich would lead. The tours allowed beleaguered Second Avenue residents perhaps to become construction fans, newly aware of the engineering intricacies and intense planning that accompanied all that noise and inconvenience.

Policy Choices

This is not a policy book but it may provoke questions. It seems the biggest question is how do we get our mojo back, our will to tackle big civic projects worth doing? This book made me wistful until I remembered that New Yorkers remain receptive to ambitious visions — it’s why some of us elected Zohran Mamdani. Perhaps there’s hope.