The bids are in on the first construction contract of Second Avenue Subway Phase 2. MTA Construction & Development opened five bids on November 22, 2023 for contract C26201 — utility relocation and building remediation at the future 106th Street station in Manhattan — and C.A.C. Industries Inc. came in apparent low at $146,999,343.
The field told a story. Forte Construction Corp took second at $168,949,000, 14.9 percent back of the low number. Triumph Construction Corp filed $180,347,000, John P. Picone Inc. came in at $224,005,000, and Tully Construction Co. topped the tab at $296,540,000. Five bidders on a nine-figure job is a real turnout, and the shape of the tab says the top three read the work roughly the same way while the back half priced it like a different job. When the numbers run that wide on underground work, the disagreement is usually about risk, not quantities.
What the low bidder signed up for is the unglamorous part of building a subway: digging up Second Avenue from 105th Street to 110th Street and moving everything that lives under it. The 106th Street station gets built cut-and-cover — the street opened up and the station box constructed from above — so the tangle of utility lines beneath the roadway has to be relocated and upgraded first. The MTA's own reasoning for splitting this work out front: handle the utilities early and you cut the risk of surprise costs and delays once station construction starts. The contract also carries temporary streetscape changes for the construction years, including replacement bike lanes, plus remediation work on buildings along the corridor, per the contract title.
This is the job that starts making East Harlem's subway real. Phase 2 extends the Q train from 96th Street north to 125th Street and west to Park Avenue — about a mile and a half — with three new stations at 106th, 116th and 125th, every one of them ADA-accessible. The MTA projects more than 100,000 riders a day once it opens. East Harlem is one of the most transit-dependent neighborhoods in the city, and it has waited decades for a line its residents were first promised generations ago. The people standing on Second Avenue watching the street come apart are the same people the finished stations are for.
An apparent low at a bid opening is a number, not a contract — every tab goes through review before anyone signs. This one went the low bidder's way. On January 22, 2024, Governor Hochul announced the award to C.A.C. Industries, a family-owned heavy civil contractor based in New York City, as an initial $182 million contract — the first of four construction contracts planned for Phase 2.
The money behind the program is committed, too: the federal government has put $3.4 billion toward Phase 2 through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. For contractors, the takeaway from this tab was simple — the East Harlem extension moved from renderings to a live construction program, with three more Phase 2 packages still to come behind this one.