Last Subway: The Long Wait for the Next Train in New York City

Last Subway: The Long Wait for the Next Train in New York City
By Philip Mark Plotch
Cornell University Press, 2020
360 pages

Ever since New York City built one of the world’s great subway systems, no promise has been more tantalizing than the proposal to build a new subway line under Second Avenue in Manhattan. Yet the Second Avenue subway — although first envisioned in the 1920s, did not open until 2017 — and even then in a truncated form. In the story of this long-awaited subway line, which Philip Mark Plotch explores in the context of the transit system around it, we learn how the subways knit York City together and how the system has staggered, revived and staggered again. In Last Subway: The Long Wait for the Next Train in New York City, Plotch discusses the problems of uneven funding, high costs, and political machinations that hobble the subway system — and how, on Second Avenue, they were finally overcome. Plotch speaks with Robert W. Snyder, Manhattan borough historian, in this New Books Network/Gotham Center for New York City History podcast interview.