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Urban Infrastructure, Reexamined

Thomas Mellins

July 24, 2025

A new exhibition helps New Yorkers appreciate how the city is held together.

A new exhibition helps New Yorkers appreciate how the city is held together.

A collection of essays written by the architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable was waggishly titled, “Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard?” Spearheaded by Robert Moses, the Bruckner Expressway, built on and above the eponymous boulevard (a dubious tribute to Bronx Borough President and U.S. Congressman Henry Bruckner), was begun in 1957, while Moses’s infamous Cross-Bronx Expressway was still under construction. Though officially deemed “complete” by 2024, work on the expressway’s Hunts Point Access Improvement Project remains ongoing, raising the questions: How has New York’s infrastructure, with all its strengths and weaknesses, come into being? Who is responsible for designing, building and maintaining the city’s transportation, water and sanitation systems, not to mention its urban development projects? When will the city truly be “finished?”

Visitors to New York from cities around the world — London, Tokyo and Shanghai, among many others — may well be surprised by the comparatively distressed state of our mass transit, which features rats on subway tracks and buses out of service or stuck in traffic. They may be dispirited by streets that flood in heavy rain and other basics that seem to lag behind our global peer cities. At the same time, the city’s staggeringly complex infrastructure daily serves 8.5 million New Yorkers, who rarely take notice of its effectiveness and efficiency. The tunnels that deliver water to New York, for instance, are a special engineering marvel

While exalting how well the city functions most of the time, a new long-term exhibition, CityWorks, at the New York Hall of Science in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, lends a gimlet eye to New York’s infrastructure, zeroing in on both its achievements and its challenges. 

The 6,000-square-foot exhibition, more than six years in the making, is aimed at a broad audience, from small children and teenagers to adults. The adeptly configured hands-on displays, with clear sightlines allowing adults to read text while keeping their kids within their peripheral vision, incorporates extensive text as well as interactives, such as games focused on park design, water distribution and waste categorization. At its core, the exhibition instructs visitors that while many of us may take for granted that buses and subways run (with the latter, unlike in every other major city in the world, operating all night long), water appears when faucets are turned on and toilets flush, every urban system exists because someone designed and built it, and every system functions because thousands of people are dedicated to doing their jobs. Additionally, we’re clearly informed, the city’s infrastructure is a work in progress. Change is incremental and often slow, and every decision profoundly affects a raft of other choices in the future. 

Credit: Learning about what holds the city together. Photo Credit: New York Hall of Science

It’s a timely moment to absorb such lessons. The challenges facing the city are undeniably huge. Much of the city’s infrastructure is over a century old (with some of it considerably older), critical maintenance has been too-long deferred and regulation can be complex. Costs, it almost goes without saying, are astronomical. The Second Avenue Subway tracks were the world’s most costly expense, priced at $2.5 billion per mile, until they were surpassed in 2023 by the East Side Access project, which connected the Long Island Rail Road to Grand Central Terminal, costing a whopping $3.5 billion per mile. (Current estimates suggest that the price tag of extending the Second Avenue Subway from 96th to 125th Street may be as high as $4.3 billion per mile.) 

Where will the necessary dollars come from? Federal funding is particularly unpredictable at this moment, when the sentiment unforgettably expressed in the 1975 New York Daily News headline, “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” may once again become a reality. Today, the critical Gateway Program improving the rail connection between New York and New Jersey has yet to be completed, and the fate of Con Edison’s offshore wind project remains unclear. Other improvements have long languished due to a lack of available resources. As many as 10 years ago, Richard Ravitch, former head of the MTA, asserted that then-existent subway switching mechanisms could increase the speed of trains threefold, that it was simply a matter of being able — and willing — to pay for it. Notwithstanding the $500 million in revenue that the city is expecting to earn during the first year of congestion pricing, funding remains a critical issue.

Yet, while challenges abound, so too do improvements, whether competed, in progress or proposed. The creation of generously scaled waterfront parks in formerly industrial or neglected areas, including Brooklyn Bridge Park, the Hudson River Greenway and Hunter’s Point South Waterfront Park, as well as the High Line, has already proven hugely successful. And the proposed Interborough Express, which would include the repurposing of a former freight railroad line, suggests that the adaptive-reuse lessons learned from the High Line may continue to reap benefits. The proposed QueensLink would reactivate an existing rail line and further incorporate bicycle and pedestrian pathways and parkland, in an effort to resolve long-fought battles between transportation and park advocates. And the completion of Water Tunnel No. 3 (tunnels 1 and 2 were completed in 1917 and 1936, respectively) will radically enhance the city’s “invisible” infrastructure. 

CityWorks leaves the economic and political realities surrounding any aspect of infrastructural improvement and expansion largely unaddressed. Perhaps public lectures and discussions — arguably a better substrate for the productive analysis of controversial issues than exhibitions — will compensate for this lack. It’s been over a decade since Superstorm Sandy served as a wakeup call in 2012 — waterfront cities throughout the world, including New York, are now acutely aware of the need to innovate and implement new ways of building in a sustainable and resilient manner during a time of climate change. (A variety of coastal resiliency projects are currently underway.) Considered more broadly, it is clear that effective infrastructure serves as a cornerstone of maintaining public health standards, economic vitality and community stability. And it is equally evident that in the face of sometimes daunting obstacles, the desire to simply get the job done must be balanced by taking a long view. It is critical that planners, engineers, architects, landscape architects and government officials, not to mention the public, think not in terms of years or even decades, but centuries, and not in terms of the five boroughs, but of the entire metropolitan region, and beyond. 

CityWorks instructs us that in order to address New York’s infrastructural needs, we must first recognize that the city as we know it simply would not be possible without its myriad systems, both seen and unseen. Equally important, the exhibition suggests, is putting a human face on infrastructure. Numerous displays focus on the contributions of municipal workers, with several incorporating audio recordings of city employees talking about their jobs. If engagement and a sense that we’re all in this together are the first steps towards agency, CityWorks may inspire New Yorkers, especially younger New Yorkers, to take the city’s pressing infrastructure issues into their own hands. And who knows, maybe someday, they’ll finish Bruckner Boulevard.