Feature

The Line That Time Forgot

The Second Avenue subway has its share of high-powered skeptics, to be sure. Michael Bloomberg, for instance, seems far more interested in the 7 line. And the Partnership for New York City, a group of 200 top CEOs, recently slammed the plan, arguing that the new line’s economic benefits didn’t justify its enormous cost.

“Outside of another politically untenable fare increase,” says Partnership CEO Kathryn Wylde, “the business community does not see where the money will come from to pay for the state’s share of projects such as the Second Avenue subway.”

Silver and Kalikow beg to differ.

The Second Avenue subway would alter life in East Side neighborhoods from Harlem down to Alphabet City. Residents would, for the first time, be spared the notorious trek to the Lex line that is known to real-estate brokers as “the walk.” As Regional Plan Association president Robert Yaro points out, the new subway would also grow the so-called hospital corridor—the big medical institutions along Second Avenue in the Twenties that are driving the city’s health-care industry.

It would transform the real-estate market. Pamela Liebman, CEO of the Corcoran Group, predicts it would produce an immediate jump of at least 10 percent in the value of apartments east of Second Avenue from the Nineties down to the Lower East Side. “It would open up the possibility of more luxury housing east of Second Avenue,” Liebman says. “It would stimulate commercial development the whole length of Second Avenue, bringing in a whole new wave of support services.”

Subway construction has often brought gentrification in its wake—the Sixth Avenue line sparked the long-term transformation of a low-slung working-class neighborhood into a wall of office towers—and the Second Avenue line would offer its own twist on the phenomenon. It would further inflate land values in upper-class Manhattan neighborhoods (notwithstanding the grumbling you occasionally hear in the luxe enclave of East End Avenue that the new line would bring in the sort of people current residents moved there to get away from). While some might find themselves priced out of Manhattan as a result, the new line could also stimulate economic development in low-income neighborhoods like Harlem and spur economic expansion in ways that, in the long run, might lift the whole city.

Just as the subways built from 1900 to 1940 shaped the city’s growth through the twentieth century, so a Second Avenue line built now, at the outset of the 21st, could help drive the city’s growth for the next hundred years. The city’s future could hinge on its ability to move people into its ever-expanding business district, and eventually, the Second Avenue line could even revert to its original purpose: a trunk line for a whole new train system. Some planners, thinking deep into the future, envision it as a jumping-off point for subways into neighborhoods in the eastern Bronx and possibly in central Brooklyn—the neighborhoods that could absorb the workforce of the future.

One person who’s thrilled by that prospect is Nagaraja, who’s looking to earn his place in the pantheon of great subway builders. At a celebration of the subway’s centennial, he found himself entranced by a large picture of William Parsons, builder of the first subway line. “One of the people who was with me commented that when they celebrate 200 years of subways, instead of Parsons’s picture, there will be your picture,” Nagaraja says, without a trace of irony. “I feel very proud of that.”