2nd Ave Subway Construction to Maybe Begin Thursday

Gov. Eliot Spitzer and a host of dignitaries will descend through a sidewalk hatch at Second Avenue and 102nd Street, a block south of the spot where Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller and Mayor John V. Lindsay held a groundbreaking in October 1972. They will go into a never-used section of a three-decade old subway tunnel, stretching from 105th Street to 99th Street. The governor will give a speech, hoist a pickax and take a few cracks at the concrete wall, symbolically beginning the construction where it left off in the 1970s.

“There used to be a saying in New York, ‘I should live so long,’ ” said William J. Ronan, the first chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, who presided over the groundbreaking in 1972.