Second Ave. Subway Lurches Forward

The Second Avenue El was dismantled in wartime 1942, and plans for a subway line were resurrected. The destruction of the Els was cast with historical import, as a false rumor spread that the Japanese bought the scrap and used it for bombs to rain down on Pearl Harbor. In 1951, a measure passed permitting the city to raise $500 million, mainly to build the Second Avenue line. But the money disappeared into repairs for the existing subway.

Then the MTA took over the city's subways in 1968 and pushed for a Second Avenue expansion of the system.

When a groundbreaking finally took place on a sunny October day in 1972, Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller joked that "no one can say that the city acted rashly." Further ceremonies followed in 1973 and 1974 for different construction locations. But the city's fiscal crisis in 1974 again braked expansion, leaving useless, disconnected stretches of tunnel.

Those sealed-off tunnels have to be maintained, at a cost of at least $20,000 a year, because they support the streets above, said Peter G. Cafiero, acting chief of operations planning for the MTA.

The tunnels, like any good myth, have found their way into art. In a comic play by Chad Beckim, the subway line catches three residents off-guard in gentrifying East Harlem and symbolically runs over them. One novel warns that near the Second Avenue tunnels are vampires; another book says Viking ships.

New Yorkers have suggested installing a mushroom farm or a wine cellar in the tunnels. (Former mayor Edward I. Koch said he'd rather bet on the mushroom harvest than on the completion of the subway.) In the early 1980s, the MTA announced it would rent the tunnels to any imaginative entrepreneur, and one company sought to use the space as "the world's longest filing cabinet."

But none of this solved the East Side's needs for transportation.

Urban planners and historians say the lack of a Second Avenue line has actually affected the face of the city.

The East Village and the Lower East Side -- districts settled by immigrant Jews and later Poles, Puerto Ricans and Dominicans -- remained poor tenement neighborhoods partly for lack of a subway, said Kenneth T. Jackson, a professor of urban history at Columbia University. Ditto for Second Avenue north of the United Nations at 42nd Street, he said.

"The spine of elite settlement runs up the center of the island," said Jackson. "In New York, you need to be attached to the subway system to justify high density and high rents."

While Manhattan's West Side has three subway lines, the East Side has only one, the overcrowded Lexington Avenue line, which crams in 1.5 million riders on a weekday, 30 percent of the system's ridership -- more riders than the entire rail systems of cities such as Washington, Los Angeles and Miami.

To ease the crush, officials have looked back in time and considered rebuilding a trolley line or encouraging an East River commuter ferry service, which a century ago transported millions a year. But then plans focused anew on the subway, which will eventually extend north to Harlem and south to the lower tip of Manhattan at Hanover Square.

"The history is rumors," said Maria Sorobay, 77, who has lived on Second Avenue for 35 years but is not sure she'll ever ride its subway line. "It's a good thing I like to walk."