New York
Contrary to what you may have heard, nothing is possible in New York City. Indeed, the bigger the project, the more impossible it becomes. But surely there has been no greater symbol of just how much can’t be done in New York than the storied Second Avenue Subway that was planned for Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
For nearly a century, we had heard rumors, and occasionally even the stirrings, of this accursed chimera. Generations of New Yorkers were born and have passed away waiting for the Second Avenue Subway that, like so many trains in our overtaxed subway system, was always scheduled and never came. As in some interminable litigation conceived by Dickens, this one project has been debated since 1919, and over the course of that century, money has been allocated and withdrawn several times. On one occasion, almost fully half a century ago, Mayor John Lindsay and Governor Nelson Rockefeller even showed up in hard hats and tossed a few shovelfuls of dirt to indicate that ground had been broken. But they, too, passed away, and still nothing was ever done.
But then, in 2007, work actually did begin—and this time, it continued, although with such slow, tortuous progress that the locals started to fear that it would never end. The stores and restaurants along Second Avenue were no proof against the onslaught of tunneling devices, explosives, and hard-hat brigades. Many of them went out of business. But that century of frustration and travail—not to mention a $4.3 billion price tag—suddenly seemed a distant memory when, on the dot of noon on New Year’s Day, the first trains rolled into the new stations.
In the history of infrastructure, there may never have been a greater, or more heartfelt, expression of collective elation than greeted this opening of the Second Avenue Subway. And while it is true that the new trains run for a mere mile-and-a-half between 96th Street and 63rd Street before veering west along the preestablished Q line (with entirely new stations at 96th, 86th, and 72nd Streets and a largely revamped station at 63rd), no one was in any mood to complain. Apparently money has already been earmarked to extend the line north to 125th Street in Harlem, while the timetable for its ultimate extension southward to the Wall Street area is anyone’s guess.
The new stations look very different from all the others in New York’s subway system. Rather than using the cut-and-cover method preferred in most of the older stations, with tracks just below street level, these tunnels have been dug deep into the earth and so are not supported by a forest of columns that dangerously impede movement. Instead, the stations are dominated by broad, freestanding barrel vaults that are almost as elegantly designed as the best stations in Paris, London, and Washington. They are spacious, open, and well lit, rather than narrow, dark, and menacing. And no small part of their charm comes from their inspired use of visual art.
Of course, New York is the art capital of the world, and so it seems fitting that the city should have enlisted some of the local talent to adorn the new stations. Is there a touch of pretension involved in hiring vanguardists like Chuck Close, Vik Muniz, and Sarah Sze to adorn a subway station? Probably. But if we could have done a little better, we could surely have done far worse: Each station has been transformed into a one-off gallery or museum in which the art is so site-specific that the real achievement is neither the art nor the architecture but, rather, that third thing that emerges from their happy juxtaposition.
The best of the stations, in this regard, is the one on 72nd Street, which has been given over to the mosaicized photographic images of Muniz. As befits the egalitarian, one-city spirit of such projects, the full spectrum of contemporary urban existence has been delightfully depicted on the white porcelain walls of the station: A father and child with balloons, society women, a turbaned Sikh, a gay couple, and a middle-aged man running after papers that have flown out of his attaché case—they are all here. Beyond the work’s choice and abundant detail, its chief artistic pleasure is that shock of recognition that we feel in seeing our neighbors transformed into mosaics as virtuosic as those of Venice or Ravenna.
Chuck Close’s intervention in the 86th Street station is somewhat more vexatious, although it, too, is memorable in its way. The artist has simply reworked in mosaic some of his famous massive heads, which rise from floor to ceiling and confront the public in a way that, by design, feels almost authoritarian. Some of the portraits, going back decades, depict anonymous men and women, while others are of Philip Glass, Lou Reed, and the painter Alex Katz. It is odd to find two portraits of Close himself, glaring down at passengers, Oz-like and unavoidable. But no matter how often you have seen the original paintings, there is something about their translation into mosaics that is immensely appealing, and few straphangers will be able to resist running their hands across these glistening surfaces.
I confess that Sarah Sze, up on 96th Street, leaves me a little cold. She alone has eschewed mosaics in favor of something resembling deep-blue biscuit ware, or terra-cotta, to form waves of papers sweeping from one end of the station to the other. Whatever this may or may not mean, it is visually underwhelming—as is the hyperactive vortex of lines and shapes that she designed for the above-ground entrances to the station. Unlike the other artists involved, Sze is primarily a sculptor and installation artist, and clearly those media suit her more than the flat surface of a wall.
Finally, I should mention the more modest intervention of Jean Shin at the 63rd Street station, where a series of endearing vignettes, conceived as grisaille mosaics, have been inspired by old photographs of the New York immigrant experience, circa 1900.
To preserve the hard-won unity of design and conception that dominates each of these stations, the New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority has banished all advertising and concession outlets, and even the ubiquitous buskers have been unceremoniously removed. Such measures add an air of order, approaching sterility at times, to these gleaming new spaces. Now if only the MTA could get more trains into the stations, New York would feel and function like a First World city.
James Gardner’s latest book is Buenos Aires: The Biography of a City.
