After decades of on-again, off-again promises to bring rapid transit back to East Harlem, substantive work is set to resume on the long-awaited Second Avenue subway extension.
The MTA’s board unanimously approved a $2 billion tunneling contract with a joint venture between Halmar International and FCC Construction for the northward expansion of the Q line Monday, at a special session held in Harlem.
As previously reported by the Daily News, the contract is for the overwhelming bulk of the engineering work required to expand the nascent Second Avenue line north and then east from its current terminus at E. 96th St. — including boring two new tunnel shafts up to 125th St. and Lexington Ave., and digging an underground chamber for a large station there.
Preparatory work is set to begin next month, though the actual tunneling won’t begin until a pair of new tunnel boring machines can be delivered from Germany. Those machines — which transit officials say will allow for 40% smaller work crews — are due on American shores in early 2027.
Once assembled, the machines will begin digging north from under E. 120th St., where a set of abandoned 1970s-era tunnels end.
From there, the tunnel borers will dig at a rate of 30 to 40 feet per day, according to Sib Rizwan head of the project for MTA’s construction branch.
After the tunnels and station boxes are constructed, work crews will still need to lay the tracks and outfit the stations — contracts that have yet to be awarded. The northern expansion of the Second Avenue subway is expected to open to riders in 2032.
New Yorkers were first promised a subway line under Second Avenue in the 1920s, part of an expansion of the IND lines known as the “second system.”
Though the construction of that line was waylaid by the Great Depression in the 1930s, the city tore down the elevated lines on Second and Third Avenues in the following decades, leaving communities like East Harlem without any rapid transit for more than 70 years, and overburdening the East Side’s sole subway, the Lexington Avenue line that carries the Nos. 4, 5 and 6 trains.
“I’m encouraged. I really am encouraged,” Diane Collier, head of neighborhood non-profit Uptown Grand Central, told the MTA board ahead of its vote on Monday.
“But I wanted to let you know, you’re not off the hook,” Collier said. “This community and I will be watching you — we will be prodding you — to ensure that the benefits promised and discussed will be realized.”
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