Second Avenue Celebrity Engineer

From the New Yorker - All Aboard: On time or maddeningly late, the Second Avenue rolls in - - - 

"Horodniceanu, a courtly civil engineer who was born in Romania and later fought with the Israeli Army in the Six-Day War, took up the cause of community relations. He became something of a Second Avenue subway celebrity, known to all as Michael H., a bow tie among the hardhats and the lapel pins. The four-hundred-and-eighty-five-ton tunnel-boring machine was named after his granddaughter, Adi. He led seventy-three Saturday tours of the tunnels, went door to door to assuage local shopkeepers, and cooked for the construction workers at a neighborhood restaurant, though there wasn’t much he could do about a plague of flies—a result, he theorized, of the excavation of all the old hops the neighborhood’s long-gone breweries had dumped into the ground."