A Descent Into New York's Remarkable Second Avenue Subway

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

View full slideshow >>

Photos by Derek Mead

When I lived in Beijing before the Olympics, the entire city looked like a feverish construction site, but the spectacular emblems of progress weren't just being hoisted up by cranes high above increasingly large traffic jams. They were being blasted and bored and drilled and dug; by the time China strutted out onto the global stage at the Opening Ceremony, the city had eight subway lines where, five years prior, there had been only two.
"They have a bit of a different process than we do," admitted Thomas Peyton, a soft-spoken civil engineer who is a vice president at Parsons Brinckerhoff, the company overseeing construction of New York's newest subway tunnels. We were standing on 84th Street on Thursday, above ground. About six stories below, workers in hard hats were milling about a muddy, rocky subterranean expanse. Kleig lights that illuminated hulking machinery, miles of piping, and thousands of years of dust—kept at bay by giant water diffusion cannons—gave the space an alien atmosphere. To the north, two fresh tunnels stretched into the distance; to the south, a cavern opened up beneath my childhood neighborhood like a giant underground cathedral. In the distance, more tunnelling.
Nearby, workers were atop a pile of mud, preparing explosive charges for another blast, the kind that's needed to hollow out enough space for a high-tech, $600 million subway station.
In Beijing, where all land technically belongs to the state, building a subway is mainly an engineering problem (Peyton's firm has worked on a number of Chinese rail projects too). In New York, building the world's biggest new subway line in the middle of some of its densest (and most demanding) neighborhoods is not exactly just a matter of engineering.
Between addressing a barrage of community concerns, acquiring permits, and managing the contracts of every contractor on site—from the sandhogs who build tunnels to the electricians who install the lights—Peyton said, "there's nothing as big as this."
"You always have the NIMBYs—not in my backyard," said Michael Horodniceanu, president of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's Capital Construction, while we were standing in the 86th Street cavern, a hundred feet below street level. "In this case, we're in everyone's backyard! That's why we need to go in and work as fast as we can and get out as fast as we can."