Construction on the Second Avenue Subway

Rents are falling even further on Second Avenue on the Upper East Side as the ongoing construction for the Second Avenue Subway has made residing there less desirable and doing business there substantially more difficult, Our Town reported.

Businesses between 62nd and 96th streets on Second Avenue report decreased sales and some have closed, Andre Soto, director of management at Salon Realty, a property manager, told the paper. Soto said two of the four businesses in buildings his firm manages have closed up shop. The remaining businesses had their rent lowered by 40 percent to account for plummeting sales due to construction and blocked frontage signs on the blighted avenue. [more]

Yorkshire Towers at 305 East 86th StreetResidents of the Yorkshire Towers who filed a federal lawsuit earlier this year against a variety of federal agencies as well as the Metropolitan Transportation Authority saying the MTA had “arbitrarily and capriciously” chosen to place new subway entrances on their blocks and failed to properly assess the environmental impact of the mid-block entrances, are out of luck, Second Avenue Sagas blog reported.

A judge earlier this month granted a motion to dismiss the complaint by the residents of the building, at 305 East 86th Street at Second Avenue, based on a legal technicality (see the decision below). The residents waited eight months beyond the statute of limitations, and therefore the station entrances will go ahead as planned. That suit wasn’t the first one Yorkshire Towers filed against the MTA.

In a related case last year they sued the MTA over a Freedom of Information Law request.

The MTA has faced other criticisms as it continues in the first phase of the four-phase project. Residents near the construction complained at a community board meeting a couple of months ago that the work is causing them health problems. [Second Avenue Sagas] and [Second Avenue Sagas]
[more]

Sen. Charles Schumer has rescued two Manhattan infrastructure projects from massive budget cuts proposed by the House of Representatives, DNAinfo reported.

If the cuts proposed by the 2012 transportation/housing and urban development appropriations bill had gone ahead, they would have eliminated nearly 50 percent of funding for the East Side Access project, an initiative to dramatically expand the underground rail tunnels at Grand Central Terminal, Schumer’s office said, and cut $197 million in funding for the Second Avenue Subway.

“While the cuts passed in the House put the project on life support, I am pleased we were able to beat back these cuts and keep the [East Side Access] project moving forward,” Schumer said. [more]

Some residents near the Second Avenue Subway construction are complaining that the work is causing them to cough and forcing them to keep their windows shut and repeatedly sweep their apartments due to dust, DNAinfo reported.

Residents presented their complaints at a meeting of Community Board 8 last night, where the Metropolitan Transportation Authority shared information from an air quality study it conducted at 10 locations between East 69th and East 87th streets.

According to the MTA’s preliminary findings, pollution from morning rush hour traffic should be a much greater source of concern than the construction, which recently completed its first phase (see video above). [more]

Today, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority will finish tunneling the first phase of the Second Avenue Subway, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Trains won’t be running on the new subway line for at least five years, but that’s just a blip in the long history of the project, which was first proposed in the 1920s and has been kicked around ever since. [more]

Second Avenue Subway construction

The life of the the rocks being dug up as part of the Second Avenue Subway construction does not end on Second Avenue. Instead, the rocks have become part of an ecosystem as they are being used in construction projects around the New York and New Jersey region, WNYC reported. Contractor Skanska has an agreement with the Metropolitan Transportation Administration to transport the rocks off-site to Newark. There, at Armored Recycling, the “mole rock” is turned into usable construction material using a machine called the jaw crusher. 
[more]

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is banning underground
blasting along the Second Avenue Subway construction site in the night time after 7 p.m. starting
today, the New York Times reported, in response to noise complaints
from residents and community leaders.

The project’s contract
originally allowed the blasts until midnight, although MTA construction
chief Michael Horodniceanu said they usually stopped by 9 p.m. The
blasts (listen in video above) are necessary to remove underground rock for construction
of the three new stations that will serve the route, at 96th, 86th and 72nd streets. [more]

Construction on 7 Line extension (source: MTA Facebook page)

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority proposed increasing its debt plan to $6.9 billion for its preliminary 2010 to 2014 capital budget at its board meeting this morning, GlobeSt.com reported. Those funds will be one part of the MTA’s $24 billion total capital program, as it seeks to close a $9 billion budget gap, after it already cut $2 billion from the budget last week. The MTA has also considered selling its real estate assets — like its Madison Avenue headquarters — to offset capital program budget deficits. [more]

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is cutting down its capital budget as it seeks to keep its costs down, the Wall Street Journal reported. The agency said yesterday that it had cut the cost of its five-year plan by $2 billion, to $24 billion. The MTA’s capital budget pays for projects such as the Second Avenue Subway, new train cars and buses, subway station rehabilitation and general system maintenance. While the authority and the state Legislature agreed to fund the first two years of the five-year plan last year, it still needs to find another $9 billion to pay for the following years up until 2014.  Meanwhile, this afternoon, MTA Chairman and CEO Jay Walder abruptly announced his resignation to become CEO of the MTR Corporation in Hong Kong. [more]

Now that Albany lawmakers have adjourned without doling out any additional funds to the still-incomplete Second Avenue Subway project, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is asking residents living along the future transit line to help lobby for the money. According to the Post, MTA officials are worried about running out of funds by the end of the year, which would hold up their ability to move forward with three new stations at 72nd, 86th and 96th streets. Bidding for those contracts is supposed to begin within months, but William Goodrich, the senior vice president of capital construction at the MTA, said that “without additional funding, we won’t have the ability to procure and award the remaining three contracts.” [more]