Subwayland (14 page)

Alone with the bird in the car was Eduard Karlov, a retired procurement officer for the United Nations.

Mr. Karlov, originally from Moscow, glanced over at his fellow passenger and smiled. “He does not bother me, and, in fact, I find him rather amusing,” he said, adding, to his interviewer, “I cannot give you any more details with respect to pigeons, however.”

—ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED MARCH 5, 2002

9 LIVES BY THE 3RD RAIL

The search for the Fulton Street subway cat started the other day with a hopeful heart and a healthy dose of skepticism.

For years, there have been clear signs at the station pointing to the existence of a full-time feline resident there—the suspicious absence of mice, for one, but more tellingly the tiny cans of cat food that seem to materialize behind a steel column on the downtown platform of the J and M lines.

A morning token clerk swore that the cat was real and so did a Brooklyn psychologist (my wife), who reported having seen it on her way home from work. But the consensus among conductors was that the cat was just a figment of the imaginations of weary subway riders, particularly of the mysterious woman who left the train around dawn every weekday and carefully set out cans of food for it.

“I think she might be … you know?” said one conductor, making the swirly finger sign at his temple. Another conductor said, “I've seen food there for years. I've never seen no cat.”

A third said, “I kind of worry that maybe that woman is feeding a rat and she just thinks it's a cat. You never know around here.”

With that pleasant thought in mind, a visit was paid to the station and the investigation was formally launched. In short order, it revealed the aforesaid cat food at the edge of the platform—a can of Nine Lives Salmon Supreme Entrée, another of generic-brand chicken and rice, and some dried food, accompanied by a dish of water. It also revealed evidence of a kind of consumption that had cat, not rat, written all over it: the salmon was missing but the generic chicken and the dry food were untouched, apparently disdained.

Carmen Figueroa and her boyfriend, Agosto Astorga, sitting on a bench nearby, continued to be dubious. “I never heard of a cat living in a subway station,” Mr. Astorga said. But just then, at around 11:15 a.m. he looked over the shoulder of his questioner and his eyes grew wide. “Oh, dude,” he said.

“Oh my God!” Ms. Figueroa exclaimed, pointing. “Look.”

Up and down the platform, heads turned. And behind the column where the food sat, another head also turned, a small one belonging to a distinguished, slender gray cat with dark gray stripes and a neatly washed white face, poised gracefully over the salmon. It stared intently at all the people staring in its direction, quickly took another bite and then hopped down onto the tracks, where it perched languorously atop a running rail and began to lick its paws.

It might not have been as momentous as tracking down Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster, but for some of the station's regulars it was a memorable event nonetheless: the Fulton Street cat had been found.

A makeshift committee gathered near it on the platform and began to debate why it was there.

“Maybe there's a litter of little kittens under there somewhere,” Mr. Astorga surmised.

Israel Nieves sized up the cat and concluded otherwise: “He is a hunter. He likes to stay here for the hunt.”

Later, Joey Calvanico, a glazier from Brooklyn, seemed to confirm this theory. “He's got a mouse!” he yelled, kneeling on the platform to give the play-by-play. “He's got it under his paw!”

Efrain Ortiz, for his part, wished that those skills could be exported to the side of the station where the No. 4 train stops. “A rat ran right into our train once,” he said, grimacing. “We need a cat like this over there.”

In the end, no one could quite figure out why a cat would choose to live under the platform of a working subway station and spend its days lounging on the tracks, where it must rouse itself every 10 minutes or so to leap out of the way of speeding trains.

“The only two things I know,” said Lawrence Jackson Jr., a station cleaner, “is that somehow or another, he knows not to go anywhere near the third rail. And he's clean. He never does his business up here on the platform.”

“Other than that, who knows about that crazy cat?” he added. “He's a loner.”

The only person who might have known more was the mysterious woman with the cat food, and with the help of a diligent photographer, she was finally spotted the other morning spreading out the canned sustenance for the day.

But even Muriel Sterbenz of Ridgewood, Queens, the primary benefactor of the Fulton Street cat for the last five years, said she could provide few answers about it, other than a fairly good idea of the sex—female—and a name, which she has bestowed herself: Schatzie, from the German word Schatz, or sweetheart.

“I can't figure out why Schatzie wants to stay in that subway station either,” conceded Ms. Sterbenz, a soft-spoken office worker for the State Insurance Department. “But I know one thing,” she added. “She sure wants to stay there. People have been trying to catch her for years. She's too fast for the subway, and she's too fast for them, too.”

—ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AUGUST 27, 2002

BLIND MULES

On this date a century ago, New York City was still a metropolis without a subway. But considerable evidence suggested that one was very, very near, and that it was trying hard to devour the city it was designed to help. For example:

Mansions on Park Avenue between 38th and 39th Streets were sinking into the earth, and their facades threatened to collapse. According to an account in The New York Times, inspectors tried to assure residents that the situation posed no real danger, unless, of course, they “should chance to be standing in front of their homes at the time.”

Property was not the only thing being swallowed. So were people and animals, at an alarming rate. In the fall of 1902, one Charles F. Allaire, Civil War veteran, accidentally rode his bicycle into an open subway tunnel at Amsterdam Avenue and 65th Street, breaking his right leg. Edward Morris drove a whole car in, at Broadway and 43rd Street. And several months later a runaway black gelding paid the ultimate price to the machine age: he galloped into the subway in Harlem, broke his forelegs and was put down with a police officer's pistol.

With the centennial of the subway approaching—the first passengers boarded on Oct. 27, 1904—it seemed a good time to begin a close reading of the news leading up to that momentous day. And if events from a century ago show anything clearly, it is that our urban forebears suffered greatly for the sake of the mass transit we have inherited. In fact, if the movie “Gangs of New York” tells how the city was born in the street, stories of the subway's construction tell how the modern city was really born beneath them, with great, strange and sometimes deadly labor pains.

They tell about lakes of quicksand in Chinatown and “rotten rock” under Park Avenue. They tell about the unearthing of cedar water pipes and old cannons and ancient skulls, one, according to The Times, with “two full rows of teeth that looked as though they never knew an ache.” They tell about a procession of lawsuits and accidents and angry strikes so great they would doom most major projects today.

But the stories also tell of great sacrifice. How, for example, in an era before dump trucks and bulldozers, much of the muscle work was done by pack mules lowered into tunnels in 1900 when digging began and not brought out again until it was finished—many of them going blind in the interim. An article in the winter of 1903 described one such valiant mule, sometimes called Jim by the workers.

“For the last year,” the article said, “Jim has never opened his eyes, not even when a blast of dynamite was exploded in his vicinity. And although he must be as blind as a bat to all intents, his drivers say he never makes a misstep.”

Some of the tunnel workers did not fare so well: one hallucinated a fire-breathing dog; another quit because he thought he saw a tiger in the tunnels. The articles tell of some very bad luck, too, personified mostly in Maj. Ira A. Shaler, who earned the nickname the “hoodoo contractor” after a dynamite accident and later a tunnel collapse on his watch in 1902 killed five people, wrecked the Murray Hill Hotel and began to sink several art-filled Park Avenue mansions.

That same year, during a tunnel inspection with the chief subway engineer, the major stepped a few inches in the wrong direction and was crushed by a falling boulder.

Most of the misfortunes of subway building were much more mundane. For example, workers had to wade through sewers and contend with man-size icicles dangling from boulders. They had to untangle such a mess of iron and clay beneath 23rd Street that one engineer surmised that more money had been spent on utility pipes there “than under any other thoroughfare in New York, or in the United States for that matter.”

Of course, none of the stories go so far as to suggest that New Yorkers, being New Yorkers even then, took ruined streets and gas leaks and collapses and noise and fires and rat infestations with anything nearly approaching good grace.

It was a city that, while part Dodge City—murderous gangs still roamed Kips Bay, commandeering businesses and attacking police officers—was trying very hard to calm down and clean up.

The offices of The Times were flooded with angry subway complaints for years, mounting as the work dragged on. One 1902 article, summarizing, said the public was finally “beginning to ask if, in their case, patience does not cease to be a virtue.”

In March of 1903, a gang of ax-bearing men under the command of a police captain destroyed part of a noisy stone-crushing machine near Bryant Park. One night, guests at the Waldorf-Astoria decided they had had enough, too. Awakened by “such a clatter and racket that it was impossible to sleep or have any peace of mind,” they complained angrily to the manager, who complained angrily to the Board of Health, which decided to order the suspension of the work.

Somehow, the subway was finished anyway. But even its workers stopped trying to bet on when. “Anyone who tries to say exactly when this work will be finished,” one mining foreman said, “is a blamed fool. There's no telling.”

—ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 25, 2003

BAG OF RATS

There are many different ways to categorize the subway's 468 stations: the oldest, the busiest, the deepest, the darkest, the hottest, the most fragrant.

The other day a group of extraordinarily knowledgeable subway buffs were debating a more subjective and much less desirable distinction: the ugliest.

High on their list was the Wilson Avenue station on the L line, which offers a lovely view of a cemetery through razor wire. Also in contention were 205th Street in the Bronx, where much of the concrete looks like old goat cheese, and the Bowery station, a fittingly corroded shrine to dereliction.

But eventually they came to settle on the Chambers Street station beneath the Municipal Building as the clear winner in their 2003 subway-station ugly contest. Among the online comments from the judges was that the station was “pretty nasty!!!”Another, exhibiting more emotion than attention to grammar, wrote: “OH GOD, it disgusting and it fulls of YUCKS.”

A third wrote that there was a good reason the station was used as a setting for the 1984 horror film “C.H.U.D.” about a collection of man-eating monsters who lived beneath New York. (In the movie, the letters seemed to stand for “cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers”; Chambers Street was not, unfortunately, featured in the 1989 sequel, “C.H.U.D. II: Bud the Chud.”)

The buffs who awarded the Chambers Street station its dubious crown are in a good position to know. Congregating virtually around
nycsubway.org
, a Web site, they have photographed and documented the subway over the last few years with more zeal than scientists studying endangered species. They can talk with equal authority about everything from motormen's radio codes to the Malbone Street wreck of 1918 (97 killed in Brooklyn). Their site even offers a translation of a French guide to subway signals, the rare and highly revered “Les signaux du New York City Subway.”

But this column still wanted to see for itself whether the station deserved the distinction, and so a recent morning was spent in critical appraisal. The first realization that strikes the visitor upon entering the Chambers Street station is how comfortably roomy it is. The second realization is why: It is almost as big as an airplane hangar and, for most of the day, almost completely deserted. One subway buff, Peter Farrell, compares it aptly to “a bombed-out European cathedral” after World War II.

When it was being built before World War I, Chambers Street was envisioned as a City Hall terminal, a kind of downtown Grand Central at a time when the business and population center of the city was still closer to the southern end of the island. Three years after it opened, its four wide platforms were so overcrowded that one newspaper article described them as “more dangerous during the rush hours than at the Grand Central or the Fourteenth Street Stations.”

But by the mid-1920's, the subway itself was pushing the city's population north and leaving Chambers Street far behind. In fact, the station's ridership had dropped off so steeply that half of it was closed by the 1930's.

Walking around the station now, it seems as if half of the station has not been cleaned or repaired since the 1930's, either. Platforms are piled deep with the detritus of the years—an old push broom, a broken umbrella, a toaster and several foothills of soda bottles, all of which could be precisely dated according to the depth of the dark-brown steel dust coating them. In one part of the platform, an original Heins and LaFarge terra cotta plaque of the Brooklyn Bridge seems to have been crowbarred off the wall. In another, the yellowish-white water damage is so extensive it appears that a pack of C.H.U.D.'s has tried to eat its way to daylight.