Ben McGrath: Checking In on the Second Avenue Subway: The New Yorker "We are totally on budget, and we are on time," Michael Horodniceanu, the president of M.T.A. Capital Construction, said recently, and if there were any snickers from his audience they were drowned out by the echoing rattles of jackhammers. He was referring to the Second Avenue Subway, a project now in its ninth decade of gestation, as he stood in muck about a hundred feet below Eighty-fourth Street, in a cavern so vast that, he said, it could hold fifty-five thousand elephants. White elephants, perhaps? Nearby, someone had scrawled "heavy duty" in the dust coating a large Caterpillar, which could have passed for a relic from the nineteen-seventies, the last time the city's sandhogs were excavating the so-called Line That Time Forgot. This was rock dust, from blasted Manhattan schist that Horodniceanu estimated to be three hundred and fifty million years old. An amateur spelunker, stooping to pocket a souvenir stone, began to reconsider the notion of a working subway tunnel east of Lexington Avenue as something other than a punch line about endless futility. What's another few decades in the context of geologic time? . . .