The journalists pressed against the front end of the car, trying to get a good look into the next one, where the mayor and the governor were pressed in with their staffs, but it was too crowded in there to see much.At the next two stops, the reporters were mostly herded into a roped-off stable at the top of the escalators, so that when the mayor and governor and the rest of the grinning guests ascended into the brightly-lit mezzanine of each station, they were photographed as if they were entering a fancy opening gala or political fundraiser at a cavernous contemporary art gallery. There were no billboards on the walls: just giant mosaic and tile portraits by Chuck Close, the kind you're likely to see at the Met or the MoMA. Imagine a subway station where, while waiting for our trains, we staring not at phones but art.As you fly swiftly underground
with a song in your ears
or lost in the maze of a book,remember the ones who descended here
into the mire of bedrock
to bore a hole through this granite,to clear a passage for you
where there was only darkness and stone.
Remember as you come up into the light.
The governor did not not have time to get into the risks that come with digging around faults and shear zones, the need to build around the many other tunnels, utility lines, pipes and cables that fill the underground in their own webs (the workers union said costs could have been cut if the subway had been dug deeper to avoid many of those things); nor did the governor talk about the giant water diffusion cannons that engineers used to cope with the problem of dust underground, or the way they coped with the constant threat of water too, the scourge of all subways: To know where the water was, they relied on a topographical map, first drawn in 1865 by the civil engineer Col. Egbert L. Viele, which illustrates the flows of the various waterways coursing through Manhattan island to this day.Read more: A Descent Into New York's Remarkable Second Avenue Subway
Near midnight, Governor Cuomo took the podium for a third time, as a selection of engineers, officials, and subway workers lined up on the stage behind him, some of them in the orange safety jerseys they had been wearing a lot recently. But it was late, and as he began to praise them and their hard work, all of a sudden a spontaneous countdown began in the giddy crowd, cutting him off."It wasn't until it opened and I saw the public in it that it was so humbling to realize the immensity of the public and the timelessness of it."
Read more: The Men and Machines That Built New York's Most Expensive Subway