(Second Avenue Subway tunnel, what might have been)
Just three more nights until the Second Avenue Subway groundbreaking ceremony – it will be the third and hopefully the final one. Both the News and the Times foreshadow the historic event.
From the Times:
Gov. Eliot Spitzer and a host of dignitaries will descend through a sidewalk hatch at Second Avenue and 102nd Street, a block south of the spot where Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller and Mayor John V. Lindsay held a groundbreaking in October 1972. They will go into a never-used section of a three-decade old subway tunnel, stretching from 105th Street to 99th Street. The governor will give a speech, hoist a pickax and take a few cracks at the concrete wall, symbolically beginning the construction where it left off in the 1970s.
Coincidentally, just the other week I ran into Henry “Starquest” Stern on the overcrowded Lexington Line one morning. The former councilman and parks commissioner recalled attending the 1972 groundbreaking.
And, he says it was his idea to convert the unused portion of the tunnel after construction was abandoned during the fiscal crisis into “mushroom farms.” That proposal never moved forward.
-- Chuck Bennett
