The Second Avenue Subway extension to 125th Street has reached another milestone.
The MTA broke ground Monday on the shaft where a tunnel boring machine will go down next year and dig a tunnel from 120th Street to 125th Street.
This is the second attempt at building the tunnels after the first stopped due to the city’s fiscal crisis in the 1970s.
What You Need To Know
- A state-of-the-art boring machine, which arrives early next year, will dig a tunnel from 120th Street and Second Avenue to 125th Street and Park Avenue
- The second phase of the Second Avenue Subway is on schedule, and utility relocation, which wasn’t done in the first phase, is ahead of schedule
- Plans for the Second Avenue Subway have been in the works for about 100 years, and ground was broken in 1972. Some tunnels were built but were stalled by the city’s fiscal crisis
“The Knicks were starting their last championship season at the very time of this last groundbreaking,” Gov. Kathy Hochul said. “So, I digress a little bit, but it’s been revived. We got further went up to 96th [Street] 10 years ago, and the people of East Harlem have never stopped wanting this subway completed.”
The work to relocate utilities is ahead of schedule, which will allow the work to construct the 106th Street station to begin in the coming months.
In the first phase, utilities were moved as the construction progressed, costing time and money.
“Here’s what we learned from the first phase, which is that you have to move all those 19th century utilities underground out of the way,” MTA Chairman and CEO Janno Lieber said. “So you’re not, you’re not playing hide-and-go-seek with what was built in the 19th century.”
“But it’s not on the plans. And we’re doing many fewer contracts. That first phase, you had a lot of different contracts,” Lieber added. “You tried to break it up into a lot of different pieces of work, and they all ran into each other and delayed each other.”
The tunnels that were built in the 1970s are also saving money. The contract to connect them to the tracks from 96th Street that actually end at 105th Street and build the 106th Street station was just awarded after the federal government finally restored its $3.4 billion share of funding for the project.
“We knew that [President Donald] Trump would try to take this away. So we worked hard together to make sure we wrote into the law,” Sen. Chuck Schumer said. “As the term was ending, that they couldn’t do it. They tried and tried and tried, but they couldn’t do it. And here we are today. Trump. You lost. We won.”
When it’s all done in 2032, it will serve more than 100,000 daily riders.
