Second Avenue Subway Work To Begin

Believe it — work is set to begin on the Second Avenue Subway in 2008:

Phase 1 of the project calls for the construction of stations at East 96th, 86th, and 72nd streets, and a connection to existing tracks at 63rd Street.

A giant hole will be dug between 92nd and 95th streets to allow the tunnel-boring machine to launch under ground, said Mysore Nagaraja, president of MTA Capital Construction.

The Post warns, however, that if they find too many arrowheads, work will stop:

. . . [A]rchaeologists will be on hand to halt the massive tunnel-boring machine at the first sign of artifacts dating back hundreds of years . . . officials said.

A consultant hired by the MTA told the agency that there is the potential for Native American and Colonial artifacts along the route, which was once closer to the shoreline than it is today, said Amanda Sutphin of the Landmarks Preservation Commission.

“You don’t know what is there until you start digging and it can actually be tested,” Sutphin said. “The topography of Manhattan was very different back then. Hills were leveled and valleys filled in.”

St. Mark’s Place T-Shirts To The Contrary, Punk’s Probably Dead By This Point

Punk rock comes full circle as a former East Village club actually becomes a “dive bar”:

After a 15-year run on Third Ave. near St. Mark’s Pl., Continental celebrated its last night as a punk rock club on Sunday night. Trigger, its owner, plans to convert it into a dive bar, offering acoustic folk music on Sunday nights.

But for Continental’s punk finale, the volume was definitely higher than acoustic. Way, earsplittingly higher.

The final performers included such legendary acts as the Bullys, Lenny Kaye, Handsome Dick Manitoba with most of the Dictators, and C.J. Ramone.

. . .

Throughout the evening, the musicians made references to the neighborhood’s demise and the spread of New York University.

“Can you imagine in 40 years — this will be happening in Bushwick?” Kaye mused, envisioning the end of a future music venue on the current edge of gentrification.

C.J. Ramone, sans Ramones black mop of hair but with a clean-shaven head, blasted through Ramones favorites like “Blitzkrieg Bop” and “Chinese Rock” with Daniel Rey on guitar. As the familiar Ramones songs blared, young punkers in jeans and black T-shirts started diving off ledges into the crowd and surfing on top of the packed sea of punk fans’ hands.

“N.Y.U. just f—ked the whole area up,” Ramone said in between splashing the crowd in front with beer. “No offense to you guys paying a lot of money to go there — but this sucks.”

Not to ruin the mood, but it doesn’t seem like its NYU’s fault more than it’s just the fact that punk’s not as lucrative as it once was:

After the club’s last show ever ended, Trigger said what killed Continental wasn’t just the neighborhood’s change.

“A punk rock club in this neighborhood — so much has moved out to Brooklyn,” he said. But he also added, “There’s not such a strong scene as there was. I used to get 400 demos a week. Now I get five or 10. Kids are into hip-hop and electronica. S–t happens.”

And not to put too fine a point on it, but isn’t Dick Manitoba like 52 years old?

Backstory: No Local Bands From New Jersey But Boy That Plasma Television Has A Great Picture!

Survivors’ Stairway May Survive

The Survivors’ Stairway, previously thought to be threatened, may be preserved in some way after all:

There is an extremely slim chance that the staircase will be left in place while the foundations for Tower 2 are excavated around it. There is a greater chance that the 21-foot-high, 64-foot-long staircase will be moved in its entirety, perhaps ending up in another location at ground zero, perhaps returning to the Tower 2 site.

“If the decision is that it does stay there, that’s a challenge,” Lord Foster said. “We’ll work with that challenge.”

Robert Silman of Robert Silman Associates, an engineer who is preparing cost estimates for the New York Landmarks Conservancy, a preservation group, said either approach would be feasible.

To keep the staircase on site during construction, it would have to be turned into a 91-foot-high mesa in the middle of an excavation pit, stabilized by X-shaped bracing. Mr. Silman said the job of holding up the staircase would be made somewhat easier because one existing support already extended to bedrock.

To move the whole staircase, Mr. Silman said, three layers of steel beams could be inserted below the structure to create both a platform and a track system. The structure could be cut away from its surroundings by water jets, jacked up, rolled out along the track beams and then lowered onto enormous dollies.

A more likely outcome — at least at this moment — is that the surface of the staircase, which still has original stone treads in its upper flight, would be cut apart from the big bulkhead that contains it, divided into sections for easier transportation and storage, then reassembled later as a memorial artifact.

Go Lower East, Young Woman

As the immigration issue festers, authorities discover that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to keep tabs on who comes into the country:

Annie Moore is memorialized by bronze statues in New York Harbor and Ireland and cited in story and song as the first of 12 million immigrants to arrive at Ellis Island. Her story, as it has been recounted for decades, is that she went west with her family to fulfill the American dream — eventually reaching Texas, where she married a descendant of the Irish liberator Daniel O’Connell and then died accidentally under the wheels of a streetcar at the age of 46.

The first part of the myth seems authentic enough.

Hustled ahead of a burly German by her two younger brothers and by an Irish longshoreman who shouted “Ladies first,” one Annie Moore from County Cork set foot on Ellis Island ahead of the other passengers from the steamship Nevada on Jan. 1, 1892, her 15th birthday. She was officially registered by the former private secretary to the secretary of the treasury and was presented with a $10 gold piece by the superintendent of immigration.

“She says she will never part with it, but will always keep it as a pleasant memento of the occasion,” The New York Times reported in describing the ceremonies inaugurating Ellis Island.

As for what happened next, though, history appears to have embraced the wrong Annie Moore.

“It’s a classic go-West-young-woman tale riddled with tragedy,” said Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak, a professional genealogist. “If only it were true.”

. . .

According to [Mrs. Smolenyak Smolenyak’s] latest research, Annie’s father was a longshoreman. She married a bakery clerk. They had at least 11 children. Five survived to adulthood and three had children of their own. She died of heart failure in 1924 at 47. Her brother Anthony, who arrived with Annie and Philip on the Nevada, died in his 20’s in the Bronx and was temporarily buried in potter’s field.

Annie lived and died within a few square blocks on the Lower East Side, where some of her descendants lived until just recently. She is buried with 6 of her 11 children (five infants and one who survived to 21) alongside the famous and forgotten in a Queens cemetery.

Her living descendants include great-grandchildren, the great-nephew and the great-niece. One of the descendants is an investment counselor and another a Ph.D.

Paralegals On Deliveries Overlook 17 MPG To Pay Homage To A Great Vehicle

The Daily News has the headline of the day — “Ford to Town Car: Drop Dead”:

For the aspiring Wall Street titan or the mobster looking to make an impression (or maybe dump a body), the Lincoln Town Car is the ride of choice.

Now it could be the end of the road for the smooth-riding sedan that’s as familiar to New Yorkers as yellow cabs and Ford Crown Victoria police cars and has been part of the city’s landscape for more than 25 years.

To cut costs, Ford is expected to close the Michigan plant where the Town Car is built — and hasn’t committed to building it beyond next year.

“The black cabs are a part of New York just like the old Checker cab,” said James McCowen, 23, a Manhattan paralegal. “I would hate to see them go away.”

“They’re really nice cars,” added Alex Weiss, an investment banking analyst at Lehman Brothers who uses a car service at least four times a month. “It’s spacious, the leather seats are nice and it’s just a nice ride.”

Drivers love them, too.

“This car is No. 1,” said veteran driver Mike Ali, 44, of Staten Island, whose 1999 Town Car has 194,343 miles on the odometer. “It runs forever and, if I need to fix it, I can fix it for cheap.”

Ali said he is not impressed with the cars likely to take the Town Car’s place — Ford’s Mercury Grand Marquis or DaimlerChrysler’s Chrysler 300. “I don’t think any of us would think of switching,” he said.

(Meanwhile, Battery Park City residents probably won’t shed any tears for the beasts.)