2nd Ave Between 85th St and 87th St

     

Walking along Second Avenue you get the sense that you're experiencing history. For an entire generation Manhattan hasn't seen a new Subway line constructed. With a few exceptions the streets of the city have remained un-scarred by the destructive work required to build the world's largest mass transit system. But now, after nearly 80 years of planning, we finally get to see what it's like to be horribly inconvenienced by a massive public works project, the likes of which haven't been seen since our grandparents.

Granted, in the early 20th Century the construction methods were far less kind to the street. Using cut-and-cover to essentially turn New York into a series of ditches the original IRT system was built in just a few years (the brute force method I guess you could call it). Now modern techniques allow TBM's to work silently 10 stories below the surface. There will be a bit of cut-and-cover used during the construction, but nothing on the scale of the original. And unfortunately it now seems to take decades just to get the simplest things done. However unlike the early 1900's, the worst we have to deal with is narrower sidewalks and re-routed traffic. But it's still fun to look down into the holes dug into the street and think that such construction hasn't been seen here in quite some time.