Kalikow, Bruised, Takes a Bow

It is a wonder Peter Kalikow held on as long as he did as chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, because, in announcing his resignation today, he certainly didn’t sound like he had had a good time:

Make no mistake about it. This was a tough job. I could actually take my jacket off and show you my bruises to prove it, some of them more painful than others.

At another point, he called being chairman “a satisfying but grueling job, but also the hardest work I have ever done." Oh, sure, he said he was proud of many things, but it's easy, as work on the Second Avenue Subway is under way, to forget all the things that didn’t go well on his watch: a two-day transit-workers strike, accusations over two sets of books, politically motivated land sales, and so on.