One of the first things you notice aboard an uptown Q train above 63rd Street is the quiet. The Second Avenue subway doesn’t sound like any other train you’ll ride in the city. You read later that’s because the subway is constructed with low vibration track along its 22,000 feet.
The men and women in their navy sweatshirts and orange reflective vests stenciled NYC Transit are the heroes of the Second Avenue line. At 86th Street, at 72nd Street, people with smartphones photograph the stations. If you need proof that public works lift us, ride the Second Avenue subway.
Alighting from the Second Avenue subway at 86th Street, the Upper East Side feels like a city visited for the first time. The light, the apartments, the grocers and the theaters. Third Avenue seems relieved to have regained its place as just one of the avenues that travel uptown, and not a border of the eastern edge of Manhattan. Now you can ride between the Upper East Side of Manhattan and Coney Island in Brooklyn.