The Routes Not Taken Read online

  Work on 2nd Avenue proceeded slowly. Leftover parts of the 2nd Avenue El’s structure along with unmapped water and sewer lines and utility ducts were discovered. They weren’t on any street diagrams or blueprints, and these elements needed to be removed or relocated before heavy construction started.81

  Another ceremony began work on a different 2nd Avenue segment that fall. Lindsay and Ronan broke ground at Chrystie Street and Canal Street for a segment that would run south under the Manhattan Bridge and adjacent to the new Confucius Plaza housing development to Chatham Square in Chinatown.

  The question of funding for the 2nd Avenue line and the other “New Routes” lines remained unanswered. Governor Rockefeller proposed another bond issue. Authorization for the sale of $3.4 billion in bonds ($18.3 billion in 2011 dollars) would be sought in November; $1.35 billion ($7.26 billion in 2011 dollars) would go toward the new subway lines and maintain the thirty-five-cent fare. New York City voters supported the bond issue this time, but it wasn’t enough to overcome opposition in the suburbs and upstate. Ronan still expected transit system expansion to proceed.

  With construction of the three segments of the 2nd Avenue line underway with a 1981 expected completion date, the Department of City Planning and the Municipal Arts Society studied how to integrate development along 2nd Avenue and build stations on the subway line. Its view was that “the logic for locating new subway entrances in buildings and plazas is simple, straightforward, and clearly in the public interest.… The opportunity to carry such logic into effect came with the construction of the Second Avenue Subway. A new subway does not merely move masses of people from point to point but new pedestrian traffic and ‘opens up’ new territory as surely as the westward push of the railroad once did.”82 In their report, Humanizing Subway Entrances, the Second Avenue Study Group proposed zoning changes in the areas near stations, which would facilitate the construction of plazas and arcades where station entrances would be located.

  Figure 9-9. The City Planning Commission wanted station entrances on the 2nd Avenue line built into plazas and arcades. Areas along 2nd Avenue were zoned for that; buildings were erected to allow for the construction of entrances. An example is this plaza at East 33rd Street and 2nd Avenue. (Photo by the author)

  In the last week of 1973, as the Lindsay administration was winding down, the Board of Estimate enacted zoning regulations establishing “Transit Land Use Districts,” formalizing the study. Comptroller Abraham D. Beame, the incoming mayor, embraced this concept. With the new zoning regulations in effect, new buildings were erected in the Transit Land Use Districts with off-street areas for station entrances within property lines. These are still visible at many points along 2nd Avenue, and the zoning regulations remain in effect.

  Mayor Beame, Governor Malcolm Wilson (who replaced Rockefeller after he resigned (he would later become vice president to Gerald Ford), and the MTA’s new chairman, David L. Yunich (who replaced Ronan in May 1974), officiated at a ceremony marking the start of work on a fourth segment in the East Village on July 25, 1974. This segment would be built between East 2nd and East 9th Streets. Bids would be opened for work on a fifth segment between East 50th Street and East 54th Street. “Planners have been beating around the mulberry bush with this line since 1920,” Yunich said. “It’s fundamental to the future development of New York if we want to entice business and manufacturers to come in.… It’s a gross injustice to refer to this as simply a Second Avenue line when in fact it is a new interborough system with connections to Queens, the Bronx and Brooklyn.”83

  Funding remained an issue. In October 1974, UMTA Administrator Frank C. Herringer warned against using federal funding to offset operating deficits: “I don’t think that we should structure a national transit program to save the 35-cent fare or any fare. I’d hate to see the capital program grind to a halt in order to maintain the 35-cent fare.”84

  Budgetary concerns were wearing “New Routes” down. Yunich, Beame, and the Board of Estimate met on October 31 and announced that the 2nd Avenue line would be delayed until at least 1986.85

  A week later, Yunich announced further delays. The completion dates for the “Cuphandle” line and routes in other boroughs were extended to the 1990s. Work on 2nd Avenue continued, but the line would not be completed until 1988. When asked if the new delays canceled some lines, Yunich said, “I think that when a project is put off that far, it’s a polite way of saying ‘not in our lifetime.’ ”86

  Mayor Beame announced further delays to 2nd Avenue in 1974 and revealed that only part of the line would be built. Completion was now scheduled for 1992. Despite the work on the two line segments in East Harlem, the only part of the route to be into service would be the segment from Lower Manhattan to 63rd Street, connecting with the tunnel to Queens. Work continued on the 63rd Street line, which would eventually lead to the construction of the first 2nd Avenue segment.

  Figure 9-10. Mayor Abraham D. Beame, Governor Malcolm Wilson, and MTA Chairman David L. Yunich breaking ground for the East Village segment of the 2nd Avenue subway on July 25, 1974. (Photo courtesy of the New York Transit Museum Archives)

  Even that cutback might not be enough. On January 4, 1975, CPC Chairman John E. Zuccotti stated the city was $700 million short of the $2.5 billion ($10.5 billion in 2011 dollars) needed for capital work and fare stability. Then came the financial crisis that beset the city and state in the mid-1970s. On September 25, 1975, citing the lack of state funding, Beame directed the MTA to cease work on the East 2nd Street–East 9th Street segment. The city financed this work anticipating reimbursement from the state, but none came. The East Harlem and Chinatown segments were completed, but the East Village segment was filled in and paved over.

  A new effort was made for a transit line on the East Side of Manhattan in the late 1980s. Using a federal grant, the MTA undertook the Manhattan East Side Alternatives Study (MESA) in 1995. MESA looked at options including reviving 2nd Avenue, restoring trolley service (now called Light Rail Transit) to the East Side, creating a busway along 1st or 2nd Avenues, or improving the signal system of the Lexington Avenue line so that it could handle more trains.87

  By 1999, MESA leaned toward a scaled-down version of 2nd Avenue, connecting with the 63rd Street line and running to 125th Street. Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani supported it, although he wanted higher priority given to extending the Flushing line to the west to serve the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center on West 34th Street and a proposed sports complex.88

  The shortened 2nd Avenue line was opposed on the East Side and in the Bronx. A group of elected officials, led by Representatives Eliot L. Engel and Carolyn B. Maloney, Public Advocate Mark Green,89 and Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields wrote to MTA Chairman E. Virgil Conway, calling for a full-length line to be built. Sheldon Silver, the speaker of the New York State Assembly, also supported the full-length line.

  Figure 9-11. The Lexington Avenue Station on the 63rd Street line was built to be a four track station with temporary tiled walls. Wooden walls have been installed while the platform is rebuilt to create a transfer with the 2nd Avenue line. (Photo by the author)

  Forty of the forty-five speakers at the MESA public hearing on September of 1999 called for the full-length line. The MTA issued a statement in the Federal Register on March 22, 2001, stating that they would focus on the full-length line. After public hearings on May 12 and 13, 2003, that option was selected. Representative Anthony D. Weiner summed up the feelings of the public hearings’ participants when he said, “This is going to be noisy, this is going to be dusty, and there are going to be people who have their dishes shaking off of their cabinets during part of this work, but at the end of the day, I think that we can’t live without the 2nd Avenue subway.”90

  A new groundbreaking took place for the 2nd Avenue line in the lower East Harlem tunnel segment on April 12, 2007, the same segment Governor Rockefeller and Mayor Lindsay broke ground for three decades earlier. Governor Eliot Spitzer and MTA Chairman Pete
r Kalikow led the ceremony.

  The 2nd Avenue line will be built in four segments. The first, now under way, runs south from 96th Street to connect with the 63rd Street and the Broadway lines. The Lexington Avenue station on the 63rd Street line was built as a four-track station, with the side of the platform used by 2nd Avenue trains walled off from the side used by Queens Boulevard line trains. The walls are being removed and the station rebuilt to allow for transfers between the two lines. Completion is scheduled for 2016.

  The 2nd Avenue line’s next phase will utilize the two East Harlem segments and run to Park Avenue and East 125th Street, meeting the Metro-North Railroad and the Lexington Avenue line. Subsequent segments will be built to 2nd Avenue and Houston Street and then to Hanover Square in Lower Manhattan. The fate of those segments, as with every other plan in the past, rests on what funding is available in the future.

  But that’s a story for another time.

  10

  Other Plans, Other Lines, Other Issues in the Postwar Years

  General Charles P. Gross began his tenure as Board of Transportation chairman on January 7, 1946, by announcing his plans to modernize the system. Lengthening platforms, buying new trains, installing escalators, improving lighting, and paying down debt took priority. Without financial resources, greater emphasis was being placed on upgrading the existing system. No commitment was given to raising the fare.

  Gross knew the system needed to expand. It couldn’t be done without increased funding, through the farebox, increased borrowing powers, or city and state financing. He wasn’t even sure an increase of five cents was enough. At a meeting of the Queens County Transit Alliance on April 25, Gross said a five-cent increase could not provide for a system expansion sufficient to meet the city’s growth potential. A lack of funding had prevented the expansion of the Fulton Street subway to Ozone Park and the completion of the first phase of the Queens Boulevard line, its extension to 179th Street.

  Speaking at a conference sponsored by the Commerce and Industry Association of New York on November 12, Gross said, “Unless something is done to provide for necessary extensions to the system, the whole subway problem itself, most notably in Manhattan itself, the whole problem will blow up in the city’s face.”1 He thought “the present two to two and one half-hour rush hours could be stretched to three and one-half to four hours”2 if this didn’t happen.

  O’Dwyer, Gross, and Queens Borough President James A. Burke finally broke ground for the extension of the Queens Boulevard line to Hillside Avenue and 179th Street on May 5. Financing future work was on everyone’s mind. “Digging here, we might hit gold and solve all the city’s financial problems,” O’Dwyer said.3

  No gold was found, and the Queens Boulevard line never extended eastward from Jamaica. The Flushing line didn’t extend beyond Main Street and no subway tunnel was built to Staten Island. It would be almost a half century before there was official discussion of building a subway line to La Guardia Airport, and thirty years until a rail link to Idlewild Airport was considered. When it was finally built to John F. Kennedy International Airport, it was the AirTrain, built and operated by the Port Authority, charging a separate fare. From 1929 to 1945, any proposal for the Utica Avenue line had been as an IND line. From then on, it would only be considered as a branch of the IRT’s Eastern Parkway line.

  The BOT notified the Board of Estimate that a fare increase was needed on October 20. The system’s operating costs were increasing and the capital needs were still there. They were also facing demands for salary increases from the Transport Workers Union.

  The Board of Estimate held a hearing on the fare increase at City Hall that began on the morning of February 11, 1947, adjourned at 11:20 P.M., and resumed the next morning. The City Council’s chambers were used to handle the overflow crowd. The Board rejected the proposal, with only Staten Island Borough President Cornelius Hall voting in favor. O’Dwyer recognized the BOT’s need for more funding and said he would ask the state legislature to authorize a referendum authorizing the city to sell $400 million in bonds that would be exempt from the city’s debt limit to provide the necessary financial support.

  Advocacy for the Burke Avenue line took on new life when O’Dwyer assumed office. The Bronx Home News ran a full-page article on March 19, 1946, reminding readers of what happened before the war. It included a 1938 photograph of the preconstruction work on Burke Avenue, possibly the only photograph published of this, and reminded people about the sale of the New York, Westchester, and Boston Railway’s right-of-way sale. (In an interesting juxtaposition, one advertisement on that page was for a rally at James Monroe High School against the proposed Cross Bronx Expressway.)4

  George Mand of the Bronx Chamber of Commerce wrote to Gross asking what his intentions were for Burke Avenue. Gross wasn’t encouraging, saying it was too close to the White Plains Road and Dyre Avenue lines to justify building. Mand appreciated his honesty, but questioned Gross’s reasoning: “It is a fact … that the Board of Transportation as such laid out this line while the White Plains Road line was available and the Dyre Avenue line in operation as the New York, Westchester and Boston Railway—both common, especially with the latter affording better service than today—so that it will be only natural to find public opinion hard to convince that the existence of these facilities justifies the abandonment of this project at this late date.”5 Gross would speak at the Bronx Board of Trade luncheon on April 18 at the Concourse Plaza Hotel. The Burke Avenue line’s supporters hoped they would finally get a positive response.

  Gross had good and bad news. More trains would be put into service at the 177th Street–Parkchester Station on the Pelham line, making it easier for the residents of that growing area to use the subway. Express service would come to the Pelham line, and there would be increased express service on the Lexington and 7th Avenue lines. Platforms would be lengthened at IRT local stations, enabling longer trains to run, thereby increasing capacity.

  His bad news concerned Burke Avenue:

  The board has received a number of inquiries as to the construction of the Burke Avenue extension of the Concourse Line of the Independent Division of the subway system. I am informed that this extension to the IND Division was planned about 1937, in order to provide some rapid transit service in the section of the East Bronx contiguous to Burke Avenue. As designed, the extension would serve the territory between the White Plains Road line of the IRT Division and the Dyre Avenue Line, operated on the route of the old New York, Westchester and Boston Railroad.…

  … The acquisition of the New York, Westchester and Boston Railroad right-of-way has materially altered the situation as to transit in this section and there appears to be at this time no immediate necessity for the construction of the Burke Avenue extension. Studies by the engineering staff of the Board indicate that the maximum distance to either the White Plains Road Line or the Dyre Avenue Line along Burke Avenue is less than 3,500 feet. The construction of the Burke Avenue Line, therefore would be to some extent a duplication of existing facilities. It is estimated that it would cost approximately $16,000,000 to construct the Burke Avenue extension. It would be difficult to justify the expenditure of this sum for the Burke Avenue Line when there are more pressing problems for which the board, because of the financial limitations of the City, is unable to make any provision at this time.6

  Gross undoubtedly wanted that to be the final word; the elected officials and community and business officials didn’t. Borough President Lyons took the occasion of the Board of Estimate’s August 1 vote on the extension of the Queens Boulevard line to 179th Street and Hillside Avenue to protest the fact that Burke Avenue hadn’t been funded.

  Hoping this was the beginning of a major effort to expand the transit system, rather than a step toward completing the IND’s first phase, Lyons voted for it, but not without mentioning a sore point: “The Burke Avenue Extension plans are all ready. Formerly, it had top priority on the subway construction program, but during the La
Guardia Administration, the people of the Northeast Bronx were sold down the river in the form of the Boston and Westchester Railroad. This caused the Burke Avenue Extension to be bypassed.”7 It wasn’t just Burke Avenue; there was also no plan to connect the Dyre Avenue line with another subway line.

  Financial pressures on the BOT grew, and there was no help on the horizon. O’Dwyer’s Special Transit Committee wanted the fare increased to eight cents, and brought that measure to the Board of Estimate. The mayor had come to a realization that had apparently escaped his predecessors—the five-cent fare was draining the city’s financial resources at a time when there were many needs in all five boroughs. “We cannot continue to drain our current revenues to pay increased transit wages and costs at the expense of other vital services,” the committee stated to the mayor in their report. “We cannot continue to neglect our sick and unfortunate and progressively strip other essential city services from maximum potential public usefulness just to pay transit employees wages and other operating costs.”8 The Board of Estimate denied Gross’s request of $5.5 million for a pay increase for transit workers; O’Dwyer would later state that a hospital improvement program would not take place without a fare increase.9

  The relationship between O’Dwyer and Gross was different from that between Fiorello La Guardia and John Delaney. When Gross sought to appoint Edward F. Durfee as director of transit safety, O’Dwyer took steps to block the selection.10 Gross’s advocacy for raising the fare was a sore point and he accused O’Dwyer of interfering in negotiations between the Board and the Transport Workers Union. O’Dwyer responded by saying, “My paramount concern at all times, has been the improvement of service, the strengthening of safeguards for the riding public and better labor relations. My several recommendations to those ends have been rejected.” He went on to say he would hold the BOT responsible for any issues that had a negative impact on the people of the city.11