Rich Mintz  

… but doesn’t this “random” shape in a rotting MTA tile wall (ho hum, so what else is new) in the City Hall station look kind of like Africa? (Also, look at that texture underneath…)

It’s incredibly steamy down here today in the bathysphere under City Hall Park. I can feel the sweat dripping down my back — and this with the “train approaching” wind rushing out of the tunnel at my front!

Everyone keeps saying the weather will moderate. When? We can’t take another month of this…

I saw this guy reading what I infer was Batwoman: Elegy in the subway, and I thought it was cool to see someone reading a graphic novel OPENLY AND WITHOUT SHAME in the subway. And so I took a picture. And then I talked to him, and he was really nice, and he found out I hadn’t read The Sandman or Watchmen and he said, “Dude, I read Watchmen every month.” And I was ashamed.

Thanks to Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, and a passel of other inflammatory scab-pickers, the country’s been newly reminded that the World Trade Center site is still mostly a big hole in the ground. Those of us who live here, and deal daily with the dislocation of living a few blocks from a gigantic construction site, with arterial streets running along both sides and half a dozen subway lines in continuous service underneath and around it, don’t need reminding. (For the record: “yes” on the Islamic cultural center, which is six blocks from my house. Muslims were living and working in this neighborhood long before I moved in.)

There’s a piece of the project that isn’t about the World Trade tower reconstruction, isn’t about the memorial, that’s much more important than these to those of us who live down here. And that’s the Fulton Street Transit Center construction, which is just over halfway through its nine-year construction. It got a kick in the pants from the WTC project, and a $424-million-dollar jolt of energy from the stimulus, but we needed it in any case.

Being built mostly by Skanska USA, the Swedish construction behemoth you’ve never heard of but that dominates civil engineering projects here in New York, the project will link 13 underground train lines that currently pass through about six unconnected station complexes, serving hundreds of thousands of people a day. These train lines currently run through infrastructure that’s as old as the subway system itself, and they all have to continue running throughout the duration of the project, so this constitutes a massive project from the standpoint of both capital investment and logistics.

We see the logistics everywhere in Lower Manhattan, where we’re constantly detouring around construction equipment, Skanska employees, and Jersey barriers on the sidewalk and in the street. Fulton Street has been torn up, for this and other projects, the entire time I’ve been living in New York. (DeLury Park opens next month!) But the project is sorely needed, and those of us living and working down here are trying to be patient. When it’s done, we’ll have a shiny new station and vastly improved transit usability down here in Manhattan’s original dense urban neighborhood.

And while we’re on the subject, transit in Boston — which, let’s face it, was already pretty good when I lived here 25 years ago — has continued to get better. I’m prompted to say this by the experience of being on an Amtrak train originating at South Station and picking up a big mob of new passengers 5 minutes later at Back Bay. It sounds like a small thing, but it isn’t — Boston distributes its morning train dropoffs and afternoon pickups among two downtown stations, not one, reducing the crowds at each place and putting people closer to their final destinations, in a context in which each block of walking saved translates into some modelable incremental number of passengers willing to leave their cars at home.

I also marvel at the Silver Line, which seems to be some sort of magical underground BRT that whisks people from the airport into the CBD. I know it isn’t fair to expect New York to be the best at everything, but jeez, we already have the infrastructure — would it have been that hard to run a train from Penn Station right into JFK? (No, Jamaica doesn’t count. I put up with it, have even learned to like it, but it’s not the same.)

And, on a more mundane note, the trolley buses with the overhead wires are still pulling into the underground bays at Harvard Square station that were (re-)built almost 30 years ago, still tying the near northern and near western suburbs right into the central city’s transit network more tightly than any diesel bus ever could.

In New York, we have our own innovations on their way — BRT coming to my beloved M15 on 1st and 2nd Avenues next year, the 34th Street transit mall, the very successful Broadway road diet at Madison and Herald and Times Squares — but I’m still always impressed with Boston, which seems to pack an incredible amount of livability into a relatively small number of square miles.