Second Ave. Subway Lurches Forward

New Yorkers Have Waited Nearly 90 Years for the Oft-Promised East Side Line

A child's poster welcomed people to the recent Second Avenue subway groundbreaking event, held in one of the tunnels previously built for the line. (By Mary Altaffer -- Associated Press)

New York is a city of transit myths: Alligators live in the subway tunnels. A man died on the train, but no one noticed. Yeah, I'll sell you the Brooklyn Bridge.

Someday there will be a Second Avenue subway line.

That subway line, first proposed in 1920, has been repeatedly planned and abandoned. It has become New York's longest-running municipal joke, its partially built, unused tunnels a hollow promise of economic growth snaking under the East Side of Manhattan.

But a groundbreaking ceremony this month -- the line's fourth -- has relaunched construction on what would be the first New York subway line to be built in more than 70 years. After the four phases of construction are completed, the Second Avenue train is to shuttle from Lower Manhattan to Spanish Harlem and link some of Manhattan's wealthiest neighborhoods and some of its poorest.

The Second Avenue subway has become a metaphor for the city's grand ambitions and its inability to get things done. Its status has marked the city's ragged cycles of boom and bust, each optimistic period causing officials to haul out the subway plans and each recession prompting them to be shelved.

"As goes the Second Avenue subway, so goes New York," said Daniel L. Doctoroff, the city's deputy mayor for economic development. He spoke at the groundbreaking, which took place in a portion of the unused Second Avenue tunnel that had been sealed off -- a pristine, pale cement hollow beneath 99th Street.

Now, as New York is being reborn as a boomtown -- and its subway is no longer perceived as a lawless place of muggings, graffiti, broken doors and smashed lights -- the Second Avenue line is having another revival.

"This time it's for real," said Elliot G. Sander, executive director of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the subways.

Transportation analysts say planners want to keep pace with the growing city. Subway ridership last year was 1.4 billion, its highest since 1952.

It will take $3.8 billion, mostly secured in federal and state funds, for the first phase of construction, extending the existing Q train route along Second Avenue from 63rd Street to 96th. This is due to be completed by 2013.

The first Second Avenue line, an elevated train, cast a dark shadow onto the street below and spewed out cinder, soot and noise. As subways replaced the "Els" on several north-south routes, Second Avenue was supposed to follow suit.

In 1929, plans for a Second Avenue subway were revived -- months before the stock market crash -- then were shelved because of the Great Depression.