As friends of The New York Sun gather with Mayor Eric Adams this evening at Carnegie Hall to celebrate the launch of our new (and radically improved) website, we wonder whether there could yet be light at the end of the tunnel. The tunnel to which we refer is the Second Avenue subway. The reason we ask is because it was the topic of what was our first and is still one of our most talked about editorials — “What We’re Smoking.”The editorial was pegged to the interview that Mayor Bloomberg had given us in advance of our first number, which came out on April 16, 2002. The interview was conducted by our star reporter, Ben Smith, and founding managing editor, Ira Stoll, who at one point in the parley asked the mayor about the “possibility of letting a private company build, operate, and own the Second Avenue subway line the city needs.”A nonplussed Mr. Bloomberg asked whether we could possibly be serious, and stammered a few answers, but grew exasperated and finally exclaimed, “What are you smoking?” This led to the much ballyhooed editorial and became a rallying cry of sorts, struck, as we were, that Mr. Bloomberg, who’d built one of the great fortunes of all time, would be flummoxed by the idea of involving private enterprise in a transit project.It was a symptom of the fact, the Sun observed 20 years ago, that “the structures that have dominated New York” had become “ossified and unchangeable,” whether that meant “the welfare laws or the public school system” or, indeed, the subways — or, for that matter, the number of newspapers the city and country could support. We weren’t ridiculing the mayor, or even trying to put him on the spot. We were asking a genuine poser.Based on Mr. Bloomberg’s pshawing at the Sun’s question, one might imagine that today New Yorkers are enjoying a completed Second Avenue line as planned, from Hanover Square up to East 125th Street at Harlem. Yet billions of dollars and the best efforts of the city, state, and Metropolitan Transportation Authority have yielded but a 1.5-mile stub between East 63rd Street and East 96th Street.Contrast the glacial pace of the building of the Second Avenue line with the alacrity with which, in 1904, the privately-owned Interborough Rapid Transit Company built the city’s first major subway. Despite its reliance on turn-of-the-20th century technology, that company, with a work force numbering 8,000, took but four years to build a nine-mile route from City Hall to West 145th Street. The tunnels are still in use today.Which brings us back to what we’re smoking today. It’s the same tobacco of the Constitution, free markets, private enterprise, and sound money that we were smoking when we started. We see it as the spirit of New York. We’re not about party. We’re about principle. It’s the belief that the ideas — and institutions — that have become ossified can be challenged and eclipsed and improved.By, among others, a new, high-energy mayor who came up via New York’s Finest and who — by conquering crime and incentivizing expatriate New Yorkers, including wealthy ones, to return — vows to lead a resurrection of the city. We will be rooting for his success. We look forward to conveying our warm sentiments to Hizzoner in person and sharing with him the story of how the first subway in New York was built, in secret, by a private company — called The New York Sun.
