2nd Avenue Subway

Up to now, there have always been two things you could count on never finding in New York City. One has been Judge Crater, the oldest missing person case on the police books. The Judge went missing after getting into a cab in the theater district in 1930 after lunch with his mistress, and hasn't been heard from since. His body has never showed up anywhere. Perhaps when they dig up a parking lot they'll find his bones, like King Richard III.

The second missing item is no longer missing. It is the 2nd Avenue Subway, a portion of which will open at noon on January 1, 2017. You'd have to be a dead New Yorker, or someone deep into collecting Social Security to fully understand the length of its absence from the subway map.

There is a NYT reporter, Emma G. Fitzsimmons, on whose capable shoulders the subway reporting has been falling on. Ms. Fitzsimmons wanted to talk after I emailed her my story of my father holding his breath waiting for the day to arrive when there would be a 2nd Avenue train he could get on.

Alas, my father passed away in 1987, so it has been rather easy for him to hold his breath these past 30 years. He was born in 1915 in the family cold water flat on 32nd Street and 2nd Avenue, delivered by a midwife. His birth was eventually recorded sometime in the third week in May, so he really never knew his birthdate. Over the years, it was always a good guess.

He would tell me stories of getting on the what was then the 2nd Avenue El and riding it with his mother to Astoria over the Queensboro Bridge to North Beach to frolic in the sand and surf. If you never heard of North Beach you're hardly alone. It is where LaGuardia airport is these days, and next to water you would never really think about sticking even your toe in, unless of course your plane left the runway without taking flight, or stopping. These things have happened over the years and are parts of other stories.

I don't know if my father was taken to the beach with his brothers, but someone liberated a destination sign from inside one of the trains. If I were to guess I'd say it was a cousin Archie, who as an adult later worked in Farmingdale, Long Island at Republic Aviation as an airplane mechanic, working on the test fighter planes. Archie would have brought a plane home if he had a runway

The sign has been in our family for years, and I recently passed it on to my daughter, in whose kitchen the sign now rests on display. Relaying this part of the story to Ms. Fitzsimmons produced some excitement, so a photo was provided in an email attachment.

Part of my email to Ms. Fitzsimmons was the tongue-in-cheek mention that when the new portion of the subway opened we would hold a seance and try and tell my father that the line has just opened, but that his token would be no good: he'd need a MetroCard, and a Senior one, like mine, so you could pile on for $1.35 rather the full-freight fare of $2.75.

In talking with Ms. Fitzsimmons I knew immediately she wasn't from New York, and she was probably young. Right on both counts.

Her Twitter photo (@emmagf) shows a smiling, eager young woman who tells us she's from Texas, and married to a reporter for Bloomberg News. I didn't know this when I first spoke to Emma, so I naturally asked where she was from. I was surprised to hear Texas, because I mentioned she has no drawl. She acknowledged she's lost it. She has not, however, picked up the solid New York patois. This can always be tested by asking someone to say "fuhgetabouit." If they don't sound like
Al Pacino in the movie 'Donnie Brasco,' then you know.

Ms. Fitzsimmons has grown into her responsibilities to report on subways and the capital construction projects launched by the MTA. She has purchased waterproof Timberland's and sports a hard hat when required. She has been to watery tunnels and subway cutouts to stand while trains wiz by. She's been tested under real conditions, and relates this in her narrative as a NYT Insider reporter.

One part of her work resume included viewing the LIRR access project that will link the LIRR trains coming into the city with Grand Central Terminal. This one has been going on for perhaps a decade and now has due date of 2022, or something like that.

The project has required the LIRR to come to rest under GCT, perhaps by more than 10 stories down. That is some escalator ride to the top. Knowing how escalators seem to not be in service seemingly half the time, I feel for the 160,000 expected commuters who are going to take advantage of this East Side access. They will get the bends coming up to the surface.

That is of course if there are 160,000 commuter to even use the access advantage by 2022. Increasingly, these people work from home, so there may not even be that many commuters. Time will tell.

My mention to Ms. Fitsimmons about Judge Crater didn't get a knowing response. No surprise there. The disappearance in 1930 was a long time ago, and I'm sure not part of Texas lore.

Numerous theories have been put forward over the years as to why the Judge disappeared and was probably killed. The judge was starting to become a person of interest in a local corruption case and there was speculation advanced that FDR, the New York governor at the time, wanted his Judgeship silenced before the corruption inquiry gained steam. That one doesn't seem to fit FDR's perceived style. Numerous books have been written about Judge Crater, one I recently read, 'The Vanishing Point,' by Richard Tofel, a fictionalized account of solving the mystery.

The cement shoe method of disposing a body was certainly a fate Judge Crater could have met. As to which public works project he might have become a part of (a pillar of the community) there is always the Triboro Bridge to consider, inasmuch as its construction started in 1929, but wasn't complete until 1936.

Of course, time hasn't ceased, so there is still a possibility that something might come up. King Richard III met his death in battle at Bosworth Field in 1485. In 2012, 527 years later his bones were found under a tarmac of a parking lot that adjoined the Abbey where he was probably buried in an unmarked grave, he received a proper burial in Leicester Cathedral in 2015, attended by and viewed by tens of thousands. Any identification of Judge Crater's remains would never get that kind of attention. This is, after all, not England.

When I was talking to Ms Fitzsimmons she asked me if I was going to go look at the new subway. The question caught me a little by surprise, since I can't think of any dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker going to see a public works project just because it was finished. Perhaps if I needed a subway connection to a block and building that was along the line, I might see it because I was using it, but as a point of interest, probably not.

Two of the several people interviewed in Ms. Fitzsimmons's story this morning on those who have waited a long time for the line to come into existence are Lothar Stelter, 85, and his son Lawrence. Lothar took incredible Kodachrome pictures of the Third Avenue El when he worked in the area as a telephone installer in the early 50s. He photographed the entire line, and his son, Lawrence, an architect for New York City, collected the photos for a book that remains in print, 'By the El: Third Avenue and its El at Mid-Century.' (I will brag that I put Ms. Fitzsimmons onto the father and son.)

The younger Stelter has the same reaction I do to the new line. "On the map, it looks so limited in what it can do."

In fact, to me, it's not really a complete subway line, but rather a spur, even after the project is finished and the stations north of 96th Street to 125th Street come online. The 2nd Avenue subway doesn't run down the spine of Second Avenue to the Battery, but rather hooks into an east/west section of track at 63rd Street that sends it on a westward and southward path down Broadway and 7th Avenue. It will never be a line that anyone could get onto if they awoke from a decades long coma and tried to get on at 32nd Street and 2nd Avenue.

Would a ghost have to pay?

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