Las Urbanistas

The ’90s slump was a doozy but today’s job base may limit the pain.

By Kim Christensen, Times Staff Writer; April 10, 2007

John Rockey has been hanging drywall for 35 years and he’s seen it all in the boom-again, bust-again Antelope Valley housing market.

As residential construction flourished in the late 1980s, his company’s ranks swelled to 200 — then shriveled to five when the economy tanked a couple of years later.

By the time a new building spree peaked in 2005, Rockey’s payroll had again grown to 200. But then came slumping home sales and a sharp rise in mortgage defaults and foreclosures.

Now his Lancaster-based Progression Drywall Corp. is down to 50 employees, and he’s got a serious case of deja vu.

“This is looking like 1990 all over again,” he said.

For many in the high desert north of Los Angeles, those are chilling words.

The economic downturn that racked California in the early 1990s hit especially hard there .The mere mention of the time summons images of squatters taking over their neighbors’ abandoned houses, of spiking crime rates and unprecedented gang killings, of hemorrhaging home values that took a decade to rebound.

With foreclosures on the upswing and a fresh crop of For Sale signs sprouting in front yards, Rockey and others are bracing for a return trip to a decade they’d rather forget.

“A lot of people are panicking,” said Jaimes Gumaro, a North Hollywood real estate agent who has a listing in a Palmdale neighborhood dotted with homes for sale. “They were expecting to have all this equity, and then it suddenly stopped. Now they just want to get their money out of it. They’re saying, ‘I’m outta here.’ “

Regional economists say such fears are overblown, pointing out that the job market is much stronger now than it was then.

But they also agree that outlying suburbs like the Antelope Valley are especially susceptible to the weakening housing market and the mortgage lending crisis playing out across the country.

“Right now the areas which are most vulnerable to real estate volatility would be those areas where there were a lot more new homes being built,” said Mark Schniepp, director of the California Economic Forecast, a consulting firm based in Goleta. “The development community is much quicker to cut prices than existing home sellers are, because they’ve got to move inventory. It’s not an emotional decision for them.”

Relatively low home prices have long been one of the Antelope Valley’s chief drawing cards, but that benefit has been diminished by flat or falling prices elsewhere.

“Outlying areas do better when prices are going up because people are seeking more home for the money,” said Patrick S. Duffy, managing director of Hanley Wood Market Intelligence. “If prices come down … then the Antelope Valley has to compete with softening prices in other areas.”

Rising gas prices also could take a toll on the area’s housing market, as prospective buyers think twice about the increasingly expensive commute to jobs “down below” in Los Angeles.

What’s more, the Antelope Valley has attracted waves of first-time buyers and others with modest incomes and sometimes spotty credit who must rely on high-cost “sub-prime” loans. It’s these borrowers who are now defaulting in record numbers, leading to a precipitous spike in foreclosures.

The numbers help tell the story.

Foreclosure sales in Lancaster and Palmdale rose to nearly 200 between Dec. 1 and Feb. 28, an eightfold increase in a year. That’s still well below mid-1990s levels, however, according to DataQuick Information Systems, a La Jolla research firm.

Notices of default more than doubled over the same period a year earlier, totaling more than 1,000 from December through February.

Housing starts dropped nearly 33% from 2005 to 2006, from 5,076 total units to 3,565, according to the Construction Industry Research Board in Burbank.

Home sales, including new, resales and condos, fell nearly 40% this year over last for the three months ended Feb. 28, according to DataQuick. Home values, which shot up 25% a year earlier, rose a tepid 3% for the 12 months ending Feb. 28.

For the month of February, single-family home values in Palmdale were down nearly 1% from the same month a year earlier, and in Lancaster prices sank more than 2%.

“Now we have all these folks who can’t afford their homes and their loans are adjusting, literally by the thousands,” said Peter Terracciano, who founded his Palmdale brokerage, Re/Max All Pro, in 1990, as the housing boom began to go bust.

Despite the negatives, however, economists, public officials and builders say the outlook is far from bleak.

Unlike in the 1990s, when home values dropped by as much as half, no massive layoffs are looming and the size of the area’s housing inventory is not cause for alarm, said Jack Kyser, chief economist at the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp.

“I don’t think it is going to be that bad,” Kyser said. “In the ’90s, we had a recession and a brutal economic restructuring, and we lost 200,000 jobs in aerospace just in L.A .County. This time around, we have an economy that is rather healthy.”

The slumping housing sector is not enough to pull the local economy into a bad funk, Schniepp said, and the employment picture has brightened since the time when aerospace was “the be-all and the end-all” for workers in high desert communities.

“There is more housing development, more industrial development, more office development,” he said.

Brian Ludicke, Lancaster’s planning director, said residential building permits for this fiscal year will number about 1,100 — down from a high of about 2,800 in 2005. Many builders are scaling back projects, seeking extensions on start times or not starting them at all, he said.

But he noted that commercial development remains strong in his city because of the demand for more restaurants, retail outlets and other businesses to serve a population that has boomed since the late 1980s.

“The commercial guys say, ‘Hey, there are people living in those houses and they’ve got money to spend, and, golly gee, I need to capture some of that market,’ ” he said.

Gretchen Gutierrez, executive officer of the Antelope Valley chapter of the Southern California Building Industry Assn., said builders no longer have the “Build it and they will come” attitude that resulted in huge inventories of unsold new homes in the 1990s. Now they roll out subdivisions in small phases of perhaps five houses instead of 50.

Builders also have adjusted to the market by coming up with new incentives, offering to cover prospective buyers’ closing costs or throwing in kitchen upgrades or landscaping packages. Some have cut their prices, Gutierrez said, but not by much.

“No one is running ads saying, ‘Hey, we’ve slashed $100,000 off our prices, so come see us this weekend!’ ” she said. “We’re not seeing that, which is good.”

Although no major new developments have been announced lately, work continues on already approved projects such as the 7,000-home Ritter Ranch development in Palmdale.

Empire Cos. also is proceeding with Anaverde, a 2,000-acre development in west Palmdale that will have about 5,000 homes. About 900 have been completed, Gutierrez said.

James Previti, Empire’s president and chief executive, said a loss of sub-prime lending probably will put a temporary drag on sales. But he thinks buyers will find alternatives in government-backed VA and Federal Housing Administration loans.

“I think we will be adversely affected for one or two quarters as we transition into government financing,” he said, adding that he was “still fairly bullish on the Antelope Valley.”

Drywall contractor Rockey, who gets most of his work from large builders, has a dimmer outlook.

“Every customer has a different story every day,” he said, “and they’re not good stories.”

He recently learned that the builder of 300 new houses he’d been lined up to drywall in Rancho Cucamonga abruptly halted the project, costing Rockey $4 million in work. “We’re getting killed,” he said.

Homeowner Debbie Brown remembers the last time it got ugly in Palmdale, right after she moved there in 1991. When the size of their mortgages exceeded the value of their homes, she said, people simply walked away.

“Houses were getting dumped right and left,” she said. “There were all these empty houses, and people were crawling in through the screens and living in them. It was really scary.”

Palmdale Mayor James Ledford said his city had taken steps to ward off a recurrence of past problems, citing efforts to attract new business, monitorthe upkeep of vacant properties and conduct its own inspections of government-subsidized rentals.

“My fear is not as strong today, obviously, as it was in the ’90s,” he said. “But when the ’90s hit, I think it surprised everybody and showed that the outer regions are a little more vulnerable than the core. I do feel confident that as a city we have done things to protect us.”

Terracciano, the Palmdale real estate broker, fears that many homeowners will walk away from their properties, as they did before.

“Commuters are saying, ‘Why am I driving four hours a day, getting up at 4 o’clock in the morning and getting home at 7 or 8 at night, when my home is $50,000 upside down? Why am I banging my head against this wall when I can go back to L.A.? I might not be able to own a house, but my quality of life will be better, and I’ll be able to spend more time with my family.’ “

He said his business was off 30% so far this year, on top of a 20% decline last year. One of five sales has fallen out of escrow in the last month, he said, as lenders have pulled back on sub-prime loans.

Still, Terracciano’s ridden the ups and downs of the area’s housing market long enough to remain optimistic.

“The Antelope Valley is still the last affordable place in the L.A. area,” he said. “As long as the job market remains relatively strong, we’ll be all right. We will survive.”

kim.christensen@latimes.com

Times researcher Scott Wilson contributed to this report.

By VIKAS BAJAJ; Published: April 10, 2007

There’s a disconnect between the way that an increasing number of Bay Area suburbanites would like to live, and the buildings that we see as a result.

These people crave a sense that they’re part of the action and a lifestyle that is at once convenient and cosmopolitan. They want easy access to districts that offer diversity and surprise, where shops and housing and civic activities are all close by.

Until recently, the only places that met this description were neighborhoods in San Francisco, Oakland and a handful of smaller Bay Area downtowns. But that’s changing fast — suburbs throughout the region are home to projects that claim to create urbane oases amid the sprawl of shopping centers and detached homes.

 

So far, though, the buildings that accompany the hype are more branding exercises than architecture. They wear old-time masks that treat urbanism as a gimmick, a theatrical blast from the past. A changing society gets looks that are frozen in time.

The popularity of this type of growth shows there’s room in the suburbs for density, for buildings that climb and fit snugly together. It also shows that in terms of architecture and urban design, there’s a lot more to be done.

The Bay Area has no single project as ambitious as Belmar, a 100-acre mall site being reborn as 22 blocks of a suburb outside Denver, or the redevelopment of Denver’s Stapleton airport into a 4,700-acre district modeled along traditional neighborhood lines.

Instead, smaller projects fill in the region’s blanks. But the rationale is the same — a combination of need and desire.

Both forces are at work in Petaluma, a city of 55,000 in southern Sonoma County, where a long-established downtown is being redefined.

While most Petaluma neighborhoods consist of detached houses cloaked in shrubbery and trees, the downtown is shaped by the city’s past as a commercial and agricultural hub. Ornate cast-iron landmarks survived the 1906 earthquake; gaunt metal sheds along the Petaluma River still store building materials.

You’ll now find something else downtown: the Theatre District, six blocks of buildings near the river that echo the scale and appearance of their neighbors while stacking apartments amid restaurants, offices and shops.

In all, 430 housing units have been built or approved downtown since 2003, when the City Council approved a plan to steer growth toward the city’s center. The plan came five years after a vote where residents decreed that Petaluma could no longer allow subdivisions on adjacent farmland.

“Since we can’t grow out, we can’t do sprawl,” explained City Manager Mike Bierman. “Convincing developers there was a market for downtown apartments took time, but the market has changed. We’re getting a much more urban growth now.”

It’s good growth, too.

The project fills a long-empty corner of downtown while adding a riverfront walkway that widens to include a handsome plaza with grass and trees. And while Theatre District rents start at $1,350 a month for studios, the city reserved a prominent block nearby for Downtown River Apartments — 81 units for low-income households.

As for the 12-screen cinema, it’s there by popular demand — a well-publicized lobbying effort by seven teenage girls who wanted more to do downtown.

The architecture tries to build on downtown’s strengths by echoing what’s around it. Riverfront apartments near the old sheds wear corrugated metal. The cinema’s Art Deco look harks back to storefronts a few blocks away.

The most obvious example of this is Basin Street Landing, which fills the block between the cinema and the riverfront plaza. It’s designed to look like seven buildings of varied style and age. One false front resembles a warehouse. Another is modeled on a 1930s bank.

All of which is respectful — to a fault.

This kind of mock-historic veneer is commonplace today, but in a genuinely historic setting such as downtown Petaluma, it just seems absurd.

To understand why, look no farther than the corner of the Theatre District that isn’t new: a quartet of single-story structures built between 1912 and 1930, then fused into an automobile showroom. Now they contain storefronts and the innards of the cinema.

There’s nothing elaborate about these masonry structures, but they’ve got character to spare. Each sturdy brick has a story of its own; the repairs made over time only add to the weathered allure. The thick walls show the structural heft that helped these buildings to endure.

By contrast, the facades of Basin Street Landing have all the depth of fabric glued onto plywood. One quick glance is enough to see they’re fake.

Cities insist on this sort of deference all the time. It’s politically and visually safe. But the result in Petaluma shows how one-dimensional the result can be.

---

Where Petaluma’s Theatre District takes cues from the neighbors to fill in the blanks, Santana Row in San Jose goes to the other extreme. It creates a new district from scratch and treats urbanism as ambiance.

Not that this 42-acre site in the Bay Area’s most populous city has much to draw on. The only recognizable thing nearby is the Winchester Mystery House. There are tile-roofed townhouses to the east, Westfield Valley Fair mall to the north and traffic on all sides.

All that disappears once you enter Santana Row’s three tall blocks — a color-saturated cross between old-time New York and the townscape from Disneyland’s “Pirates of the Caribbean.”

Each block consists of a single broad structure that’s four to six stories high, with glassy storefronts topped by bright facades. The columns of one building are adorned with garlic castings. Another has walls decorated with metalwork scavenged from Tunisia.

The southernmost block widens to allow a landscaped median supposedly modeled on Las Ramblas, the famous shopping street in Barcelona. Inside that median you’ll find a small 18th century chapel shipped in pieces from France and then reassembled. The chapel’s neighbor? A tequila bar.

It’s no shock to learn Robin Leach of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” hosted the 2005 lighting of Santana Row’s Christmas tree. Here’s what is harder to believe: When Santana Row opened in 2002, one executive for the developer, Federal Realty Investment Trust, billed it as “perhaps a new urban paradigm for America.” Another explained, “We’re trying to create an urban district like Greenwich Village, like SoHo.”

While the retail scene never hit the upscale heights Federal aimed for, there’s definitely a market for the rest of the show. Patrons fill the five spas and the 20 restaurants and bars. As for the 501 residential units on upper floors, when 219 were converted to condominiums last year, they sold for an average price of $700,000. Federal now is negotiating with the city to add 12-story residential towers to the mix.

“It’s all about the experience, the environment,” said Fred Walters, who oversees Santana Row for Federal. He describes the market for his turf as “modern urban, younger couples, working professionals … people who want an urban experience, like in San Francisco, but they also want to be close to work.”

The fact that restaurants are hopping and condos are selling shows that Santana Row strikes a chord. If most Americans still prefer single-family homes in quiet settings, others are eager to trade isolated quiet for concentrated buzz.

But this isn’t a neighborhood, and it’s certainly not “a new urban paradigm.” Santana Row is a world unto itself — a hopped-up blend of shopping center and entertainment zone with housing on top and free parking in back.

---

To see what’s missing at Santana Row, head back north past Petaluma to Windsor — the Bay Area’s most intriguing example of large-scale place-making, and its most frustrating.

By the time this residential enclave of 25,000 incorporated in 1992, the terrain was defined by shopping centers and wide driveways. That’s still the case on the east side of Highway 101. But visitors who exit onto Windsor River Road and head west discover something much different. The brand-new downtown looks like a storybook village pressed from a mold.

Three-story-high old-fashioned buildings frame two sides of Windsor’s large town green, line two blocks behind it and are spreading south across Windsor River Road. The structure closest to the freeway sports a whimsical 60-foot-high clock tower.

The developer, Orrin Thiessen, is the architect as well.

“Windsor didn’t have that much in the past, so I’d look at pictures of Healdsburg and Santa Rosa,” Thiessen said. “I’d take an old photograph of a building I liked and make it fit what I want.”

That’s easy to believe. Everything is fuzzy and familiar, part Old West and part Thomas Kinkade painting. Like Santana Row, the buildings are more about atmosphere than architecture. Like Petaluma, the details are pasted on.

But as cartoonish as the architecture might be, Windsor’s center functions successfully as a civic and cultural crossroads.

The green includes a stand of mature oaks and features such offerings as live music and a farmers’ market throughout the summer. Across Windsor Road from the green, a creek threads underneath a footbridge that connects a batch of Thiessen-designed lofts to 41 family apartments developed by the nonprofit Burbank Housing.

Instead of chains, storefronts contain local retailers, including two bookstores, a map shop and a natural pharmacy. The busiest may be Powell’s Sweet Shop, where schoolchildren linger on weekday afternoons.

Windsor opened the green in 2001 after purchasing land next to the town’s library and gymnasium. It then invited developers to purchase surplus land for mixed-use development with housing above offices and shops. Thiessen had done a small project along these lines in nearby Graton and wanted to do it again.

Once that land was filled, he kept going, working at an incremental scale that reduced the size of his construction loans. He’s finished 17 buildings and now is studying slides of European sidewalk scenes for a boutique hotel he has in the works.

Thiessen doesn’t apologize for how his buildings look. “A lot of people love it. A few people want to say it looks like Disneyland. Well, what’s wrong with Disneyland?”

But architectural deja vu isn’t why the downtown succeeds.

Downtown Windsor works because it serves different people in different ways. It’s growing up without overwhelming the small-town feel. You can run errands, do city business, meet friends or just hang out.

Far-sighted city planning laid the foundation. The old-time atmosphere is a distraction more than anything else.

---

A cynic would look at projects like these and dismiss the lot. They’re not Paris in the 1920s, or North Beach in 1950s, or SoHo in the 1970s.

Cue up the intellectual scorn.

But the fact is that American expectations are being redefined — and the suburban landscape where most people live is following suit.

This is, after all, a world where people want what they want when they want: music on their iPod, old movies or television shows on their DVD player, newspapers via the Internet.

Why shouldn’t urbanism be available on demand as well?

The thing is, there’s a difference between buildings and megabytes. One is ephemeral, the other isn’t. You can watch a grainy snippet on YouTube and move on, but a poorly designed building stays right where it is, looking more faded and false by the day.

The suburbia of the future will be more dense than today, with a more varied set of options. And that’s a good thing: There’s a limit to how far a region’s population should sprawl, or how much land should be consumed.

Fighting change is absurd. Sneering at it is equally absurd.

What we can ask for, though, is planning and architecture that looks to the future even as it draws on the past. This won’t be easy — but it’s what the Bay Area deserves.

---

Newburbs in the Bay Area

An ever-growing number of Bay Area suburbs are sprouting city-type downtowns and districts. Here are 10 examples - and it isn’t an exhaustive list.

 

1 COTATI: Taking cues from Windsor, this small Sonoma County town is working on plans for a zone of three-story buildings along the Old Redwood Highway. First in line: Windsor developer Orrin Thiessen has purchased 14 acres in the center of town.

2 NOVATO: The northernmost city in growth-wary Marin County allows buildings as high as 45 feet downtown if they include housing above retail and are of “exceptional design.” Already approved is a Whole Foods Market topped by 125 townhouses.

3 HERCULES: The region’s most elaborate experiment in New Urbanism is in this suburb north of Richmond, where 620 homes have ample porches and traditional flair. Next comes a waterfront district with a ferry terminal and 1,200 housing units.

4 EMERYVILLE: This old industrial hub is now a hip address with companies such as Pixar and a sea of contemporary townhomes. It also has a Santana Rowlike concoction called Bay Street; Phase 2 could include a 25-story residential tower.

5 WALNUT CREEK: It’s old news that downtown Walnut Creek is a shopping hub. The fresh twist is modern-looking housing with San Francisco prices; in the 181-unit Mercer that opens this fall, some condominiums are $1.1 million.

6 EAST DUBLIN: At the end of the BART line in eastern Alameda County, an ambitious transit center is rising that includes Camellia Place - 112 apartments for low-income residents - and the Elan complex with its marketing slogan “these aren’t your parents’ suburbs.”

7 SAN MATEO: Bay Meadows’ old training field now contains tightly packed homes, neighborhood parks and even lofts. The track itself closes this year - to be followed by 1,250 housing units along with commercial space and 15 acres of open space.

8 REDWOOD CITY: A new 20-screen multiplex highlights ambitious efforts to turn this city of 81,000 into San Mateo County’s downtown of choice. There’s more to come: new zoning allows 12-story mixed-use buildings along El Camino Real.

9 HAYWARD: More than 700 homes and a new City Hall have been built near the BART station since the city changed its downtown development rules in 1992; an additional 850 are slated for a former cannery site to the west.

10 UNION CITY: A developer has proposed four residential towers next to the BART station in this former industrial center - the centerpiece of a transformation that would place 1,000 housing units within a five-minute walk of BART.

 

Sources: Chronicle research, ESRI, TeleAtlas, USGS

The Chronicle

E-mail John King at jking@sfchronicle.com.

Mayor John V. Lindsay swung his pickax at a subway groundbreaking in 1972. Looking on, from left, were Percy E. Sutton, the Manhattan borough president; Senator Jacob K. Javits; John A. Volpe, United States secretary of transportation; and Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller.

By WILLIAM NEUMAN; Published: April 9, 2007

The neckties are wide and the sideburns long, the pickaxes gleam in the sunlight. The governor thanks the president for providing money. The mayor jokes that “whatever is said about this project in the years to come, certainly no one can say that the city acted rashly or without due deliberation.”

The Second Avenue subway is born.

Or so it seemed at the time.

 

The sideburns were long and the neckties wide because it was 1972. The president was Nixon. The governor was Rockefeller. The mayor was Lindsay. And nearly 35 years later, no trains have ever run under Second Avenue.

But the line has had at least three groundbreakings.

On Thursday it will get another one.

Gov. Eliot Spitzer and a host of dignitaries will descend through a sidewalk hatch at Second Avenue and 102nd Street, a block south of the spot where Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller and Mayor John V. Lindsay held a groundbreaking in October 1972. They will go into a never-used section of a three-decade old subway tunnel, stretching from 105th Street to 99th Street. The governor will give a speech, hoist a pickax and take a few cracks at the concrete wall, symbolically beginning the construction where it left off in the 1970s.

“There used to be a saying in New York, ‘I should live so long,’ ” said William J. Ronan, the first chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, who presided over the groundbreaking in 1972.

“Well I sure hope they’ll do it this time because time is moving on,” Dr. Ronan, 94, who lives in Florida, said. “And of course it’s going to cost a fortune, more than back when we were going to do it. It was expensive enough then.”

Several factors actually suggest that this time the outcome may be different. The financing for the $3.8 billion project appears more certain than in the past, including an anticipated federal commitment to cover about a third of the cost.

And the plan is more measured. The goal is to build a first section of the subway with stops along Second Avenue at 96th, 86th and 72nd Streets and at 63rd Street and Lexington Avenue. It is intended to operate as an extension of the Q line and is expected to open in 2013. Once further financing is secured, later phases of construction will extend the line north to 125th Street and south to Lower Manhattan.

It was September 1929 when the city formally announced plans to build the Second Avenue subway, running the length of the East Side and into the Bronx. The cost of digging the Manhattan portion of the tunnel was estimated at $99 million, although there would be additional expenses, including the cost of real estate and equipment.

The Second Avenue plans were part of an ambitious expansion to add a 100-mile network with an overall estimated cost of about $800 million. But within a few years, during the Great Depression, planning for the new line came to a halt.

The plans were revived during World War II. In 1951, voters approved a measure that allowed the city to raise $500 million for transit improvements, with the expectation that most of it would go to build the new line. But the money was used to fix up the existing system. No work was performed on Second Avenue.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority took over the city’s subway system in 1968. Dr. Ronan began championing an ambitious range of projects, including the Second Avenue subway, from Whitehall Street to 138th Street in the Bronx. In 1968 the subway line bore a remarkably modest price tag of $335 million, but by the time of the groundbreaking in 1972, it had risen to $1 billion.

That ceremony was preserved in an 8 millimeter film shot by Robert A. Olmsted, who was a top planner at the transportation authority.

In the film, the sun is shining brightly, although some of the men are wearing coats and fedoras. There is a holiday air, and the mayor and the governor are all smiles. The two have been feuding for years, but on this day, they manage to keep their pickaxes aimed at the street.

“We were optimistic,” recalled Mr. Olmsted, who is 82. “It looked like we were going to get something done.”

Dr. Ronan recalled feeling that, “at long last, we’re going to have the Second Avenue subway.”

“It was a great day when they got to the groundbreaking,” he said. “Everybody was congratulating everybody. It got good play. It should have.”

Sidney J. Frigand, who was a spokesman at the authority in 1972, said he was more skeptical, especially about how the project would be financed. “There were a lot of flaws that had to be ironed out, and I sensed that it wouldn’t proceed as rapidly as we hoped,” he said.

Last week, a reporter described the film to Mr. Frigand, including the portion where the governor’s pickax failed to make the desired impact and the jackhammer had to be called in. “That’s the perils of groundbreaking,” Mr. Frigand, 81, said.

In October 1973, a year after that ceremony, another groundbreaking was held for the start of work on the downtown section, at Canal Street. Mayor Lindsay had gone bareheaded the previous year but now, according to a report in The New York Times, he wore a hard hat and talked ominously about “brinksmanship,” suggesting the city could not afford to keep building the subway without a large infusion of federal money. The cost had reached $1.3 billion.

This time, the pavement had been broken up in advance. After the speeches, The Times reported, the mayor attacked the loosened paving blocks with his pick.

In July 1974, Mayor Abraham D. Beame attended a groundbreaking at Second Avenue and Second Street. He went at the pavement with a jackhammer. The plan was to build the subway piecemeal, contracting out short, disconnected sections.

A year later the city was near bankruptcy; Mayor Beame called a halt to further construction. The stretch of tunnel he broke ground on was never built, although three other sections were finished and sealed. They included the two that Mayor Lindsay inaugurated, from 99th Street to 105th Street and Canal Street to Chatham Square, and a section from 110th Street to 120th Street.

Edward I. Koch was a congressman in 1972, and he appears in the film of the groundbreaking, although he said last week that he did not remember the event.

“I have no recollection of that day,” said Mr. Koch, who became mayor in 1978. “I do have a recollection that the Second Avenue subway — the first shovel went into the ground when God created the earth.”