New York City-Secaucus Junction Transit?

It’s intriguing:

Ever since Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey killed an expensive plan for a new commuter rail tunnel to Manhattan, the Bloomberg administration has been working on an alternative: run the No. 7 subway train under the Hudson River.

The plan envisions the No. 7 stretching from 34th Street on the Far West Side of Manhattan to Secaucus, N.J., where there is a connection to New Jersey Transit trains. It would extend the New York City subway outside the city for the first time, giving New Jersey commuters direct access to Times Square, Grand Central Terminal and Queens, and to almost every line in the system.

Like the project scuttled by Mr. Christie, this proposed tunnel would expand a regional transportation system already operating at capacity and would double the number of trains traveling between the two states during peak hours. But it would do so at about half the cost, an estimated $5.3 billion, according to a closely guarded, four-page memorandum circulated by the city’s Hudson Yards Development Corporation.

I’m not sure I totally understand the Bloomberg administration’s preoccupation with federal money — it reminds me of children bobbing for apples and seems beneath the studiously aloof mayor (it’s also what Robert Moses was pilloried for when “he built” all those Title I projects in the 1950s and 60s).

Which is to say, while this seems like an interesting project, would it be something the City would prioritize had it not been for all that federal money? Which is also to say, why is New York City subsidizing New Jersey commuters? Are there really that many Bruce Springsteen concerts at the Meadowlands? If not, can we also get a cheap New Jersey Transit bus to Newark Liberty from Secaucus Junction when this is completed?

On The Iconic Status Of Critical Infrastructure

Taller, higher, deadlier:

As of Aug. 31, the NYPD had responded to more than 600 reports of people jumping or threatening to jump from buildings or bridges. That number marked a 27 percent increase over the same period last year.

Earlier: The Story NYC & Company Doesn’t Want You To Read.

Everything Old Is Now Radiant Again; Tim Meadows Stands Alone In A Nearly Vacant Pedestrian Plaza And Pumps Fist High Into Air Toward Brutalist Modern Architecture Rising Above

First Robert Moses (and the related Robert Moses mantle-raising bluster), and now Le Corbusier, too:

Pratt Institute School of Architecture will host the symposium “Voyage through Le Corbusier” (not to be confused with Courvoisier) on Monday, October 11 from 6 to 9 p.m. in Higgins Hall Auditorium at 61 St. James Place in Brooklyn in conjunction with the Institute’s “Le Corbusier — Miracle Boxes” exhibition.

The Michael R. Bloomberg 7 Train Extension

A big infrastructure project to put your name on:

City and MTA officials in hard hats cheered as the second of two machines — named Emma and Georgina after Mayor Bloomberg’s daughters — finished their year-long run from 34th St. and 11th Ave.

At Least They Had The Sense Not To Try To Replicate “The Mystery Of Al Capone’s Vault”

I wonder if this will be the last time the new regime at DEP tries to impress a jaded press corps with new technology:

Mr. Holloway stood near an open sewer manhole off Kent Avenue in Brooklyn beneath the Williamsburg Bridge. The hose from one of the trucks was lowered inside the manhole and soon began sucking. The smell from the open manhole was vaguely, almost sweetly, foul; no one odor was detectable, but the odor was there nonetheless.

The agency has placed machines equipped with sonar technology and video cameras into the darkened sewer system to help identify the clogged areas. About 40 percent of the interceptor lines have been tracked so far.

. . .

On two tables near the trucks was a sampling of sewer detritus, all of it pulled recently from a sewer interceptor in South Ozone Park in Queens. There were bricks, pieces of wood, chunks of concrete, metal spikes, a rusty spoon, a 20-ounce plastic bottle of Pepsi, a deflated football and a can of Zazz Seltzer.

No evidence of alligators could be found among the items on the tables.

It was at another open manhole, about nine miles away on East 123rd Street in Manhattan, that teenagers shoveling snow one February day in 1935 did, in fact, see one in a city sewer, or said they saw one. They pulled up a sickly, 125-pound, 8-foot alligator with some clothesline they borrowed from a nearby stove shop, only to kill it with their shovels after it snapped at one of the boys.