[M II A II R II K]

Deep Below Park Avenue, a Monster at Rest


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/25/ny...rest.html?_r=3

Rome has the catacombs; Paris has its sewers. Now New York will have its own subterranean wonder: a 200-ton mechanical serpent’s head. It is a gargantuan drill that has been hollowing out tunnels for a train station under Grand Central Terminal. As tall as four men and with the weight of two whales, the so-called cutter head — the spinning, sharp-edged business end of a tunnel boring machine — is usually extracted, dismantled and sold for scrap when the work is done.

But the Spanish contractor overseeing the project is taking a different approach. It believes it can save time and money by simply leaving it behind, dormant and decayed, within the rocky depths of Midtown Manhattan. The drill’s final resting place: 14 stories beneath the well-tended sidewalks of Park Avenue.

There is little precedent for such a Brobdingnagian burial. No one at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which plans to officially entomb the machine sometime this week, can recall such an interment. “It’s like a Jules Verne story,” Michael Horodniceanu, the authority’s chief of construction, said. A recent visit to the cutter’s future crypt revealed a machine that evokes an alien life form that crashed to earth a millennia ago.

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