NY1

By Ruschell Boone

Many in East Harlem are ready for the convenience of having a Second Avenue Subway line ... RanDe Rogers owns a restaurant,and he was one of the many residents who took their concerns to a public meeting on the Second Avenue Subway expansion plan.Phase 2 of the plan will add new stations at 106th and 116th streets on Second Avenue, and connect to the Lexington Avenue line at 125th Street ...

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority held a meeting in East Harlem Tuesday night to answer questions about the next phase of the Second Avenue Subway.

Phase Two would extend the line from 96th Street up to 125th Street.

Preliminary engineering on the project is already underway, along with an environmental review.

At the meeting, the MTA acknowledged that the expansion won't come cheap or easy.

People who live and work in the area say they're concerned about the effect construction could have on the community.

"We have a lot of minorities and a lot of mom-and-pop stores and it's concerning to me that they are going to be displaced," said one meeting attendee.

"We lived a very close to where phase one was and we saw how the businesses were inconvenienced and really the hardship that a lot of the residents had because of the digging so hopefully there was a learning curve in phase 1 so they can avoid a lot of those pitfalls in phase two," said another attendee.

The first section of the Second Avenue Subway opened on January 1, 2017 after nearly 10 years of construction.

It's not clear when work on Phase Two will begin.