New Yorkers no longer believed it: evoked for nearly a century, the extension to the east of Manhattan of their subway, one of the busiest in the world, will finally take shape with the opening on the 1st January of three new stations.
“No more claustrophobia that gripped you” as you walk down to the dark docks of “subway“, narrowed by a string of black steel poles, promised New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo: the new Second Avenue Line stations will be all in space and clarity, and” will be worth the trip alone. for works of art ”created by four contemporary artists.
Among these artists, the famous Chuck Close designed, for the new 86th Street station, twelve giant mosaic portraits with the features of the composer Philip Glass or the late rock legend Lou Reed. Enough to perhaps forget the ordeal that this site will have been, the largest extension of the New York subway in more than 50 years.
The Democratic governor who, like Donald Trump, has made the renovation of infrastructure a leitmotif, has put all his energy in recent months to ensure that the December 31 deadline is met.
The idea of a metro line running along 2nd Avenue dates back to 1929. Postponed for the first time by the crisis of the 1930s, it returned after the war.
The famous television series Mad Men, with a decor set in the “Big Apple” of the 1960s, evokes this interminable project: a real estate agent explains to one of the heroines that her apartment on the Upper East Side will quadruple in value with the opening of the line. ..
Scorched by decades of waiting, many New Yorkers still doubt the imminent opening of stations on 72nd, 86th and 96th Streets, which will connect the highly residential neighborhood of the Upper East Side to Coney Island, Brooklyn, with its beach and its famous amusement park.
Degraded metro, crowded passengers
“I give them a 50% chance” to open on January 1, says Jane Gaillard, decorator of the Upper East Side. “I have lived in the neighborhood since 1967 and we have never stopped talking about it”. And even if the date is held, “I won’t be on the first few trains, I don’t think it will work out well at first,” she says.
The first American megalopolis and its 8.5 million inhabitants, however, are in great need of an extended network.
Passenger traffic has steadily increased in recent years. If we are far from frequenting the major Asian subways of Tokyo, Beijing or Seoul, the New York subway and its 422 stations open 24 hours a day recorded nearly 1.8 billion trips in 2015, a record since 1948, ahead of Paris. or London.
But most of the network, opened in 1904, dates from before 1940. Since then, investments other than maintenance have been rare and not always successful: for example, the station in the new Hudson Yards district, inaugurated in September 2015 , quickly experienced water infiltration rendering some of the equipment inoperative.
When Seoul was building its subway in the 1970s, New York City was on the verge of bankruptcy. The metro quickly deteriorated, accumulating a delay that it still has not caught up with.
Many lines are now saturated, starting with those that cross Manhattan to the Bronx along Lexington Avenue. During rush hour, users often let several trains pass before piling up in crowded trains.
In this context, many are the detractors of the new section: they stress that, in spite of the 4.4 billion dollars invested and the 200,000 passengers expected each day, the improvement will only be minimal.
“I don’t know anyone whose daily life will improve”, deplores Valerie Mason, president of a residents’ association. “It won’t allow people to go up and down 2nd Avenue, it’s completely misleading to call it ‘the Second Avenue Line’.”
We are indeed far from a real line that would cross East Manhattan from north to south, as originally envisioned.
A second phase is certainly already planned to extend the route further north, to Harlem, for an additional six billion. But given the delays accumulated by the project, no one dares to put forward dates for the completion of the line.
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