Biography|Claes Björck — The East River Tubes That Opened Skanska USA

Skanska likes to say it has been in the United States for more than a century.

The corporate timeline is more precise.

The first American job the parent company claims is the 63rd Street subway line in New York, begun in the early 1970s.

On 30 August 1971 the first of four prefabricated steel tunnel sections was sunk into a trench in the East River.

The box was 375 feet long and weighed 16,000 tons.

It had been launched at Port Deposit, Maryland, and towed north.

The four tubes were stacked two-over-two: subway above, a reserved railroad level below.

Björck had spent 1968 through 1972 as a field engineer and project manager on civil jobs in Sweden, after the Gothenburg civil division hired him at 21.

In early 1972 he was sent to the newly formed Skanska (U.S.A.) as a vice president.

He was still in his mid-twenties.

The Roosevelt Island station on the IND 63rd Street Line sits about 100 feet down, because the tracks have to pass under both channels of the East River.

The station opened on 29 October 1989, long after the tubes were in the mud.

By then he was already president of Skanska USA, a title he held from the mid-1980s until he was called home to run the parent.

The visitor today rides an escalator through a station that looks more like Washington Metro than an old IND local.

The work that put the Swedish contractor on the American map is under the river outside the mezzanine.

Photo: Daniel Schwen, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons