Subwayland (18 page)

This would be an intriguing line of inquiry, except that the new No. 2 trains are actually manufactured by a Canadian company called Bombardier. Informed of this, Mr. Harvey said that he did not think the Canadians would want to brainwash us.

A call was placed to the engineers at Bombardier in Plattsburgh, N.Y., where the trains are assembled. All questions about musical trains were referred to someone named Andre, who could not take the call and did not return it yesterday.

So a reporter went to a meeting at the headquarters of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority on Madison Avenue, hoping to find answers there. Joseph Hofmann, the senior vice president for subways, professed never to have heard the song but said that if it were up to him, it would certainly not be anything from “West Side Story.” He was once an usher at a production of the musical and listened to all its songs at least two hundred times.

“Don't talk to me about ‘West Side Story,'” he said.

The question was put next to George Feinstein, the transit agency's project manager for the new trains, who said the explanation most likely was a mundane one, having to do with the advanced engines of the new trains, which use alternating instead of direct current, as older trains do. The direct current from the third rail is converted aboard the train to alternating current, and in the process, perhaps, beautiful music is made.

“I don't think anybody planned it that way,” said Mr. Feinstein, shattering the illusions of Dr. Futterman, who had hoped there was a mad transit genius out there somewhere who said to himself, “Hmmm. I've got to let the air out of this gadget one way or another. Why don't I build it so that when it does, it plays a nice little song?”

—ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JANUARY 29, 2002

THE G-TRAIN SPRINT

New York has bestowed names on many things over the years. There is the New York minute and the Bronx cheer, the Manhattan cocktail and the Waldorf salad. Even Mount Rushmore is named after a New Yorker, Charles E. Rushmore, a lawyer who owned mining property in the area.

There is now a chance that a new fitness routine will be named for something that has been happening spontaneously at subway stations in Brooklyn and Queens over the last four months. Locally, it has become known as the G-train sprint.

The basic workout goes like this: Warm up by walking through a turnstile carrying your bag and a cup of hot deli coffee. When you hear a beeping sound that means a train is approaching, start to jog toward the stairway.

Upon reaching the middle of the stairs and seeing that the train is much shorter than you thought it would be, therefore farther away, bound down the stairs two at a time, exercising your vocal chords by making panic-like sounds. Once on the platform, break into a full sprint, dodging or ramming, if necessary, the people who are getting off the train and walking in the opposite direction.

This routine is intended to work most major muscle groups, develop cardiovascular strength and improve coordination. After enough practice, you should be able to jump into the end car of the shortened train just as the doors close on your bag, splashing only a little coffee on your shirt. Do not be discouraged if you cannot perform the exercise correctly on the first few tries.

Joan Dougherty, a paralegal, was not able to do it yesterday morning at the Greenpoint Avenue station, and she has been training there for months. She complained grievously of a violation of the rules. “The guy saw me!” she said of the conductor, as his train pulled out and he watched with a bored expression as her sprint faded to a jog.

Peter Jou, a computer programmer, decided not to try at all. From the top of the stairs, he saw the train, paused and then walked calmly and evenly down as it pulled away. “I'm always afraid I'm going to fall down the stairs,” he explained.

The situation that has given rise to the G-train sprint is part of a series of Solomonic bargains, the kind that New York City Transit must make when it tries to change anything within the rigid logic of the subway.

In order to reduce crushing crowding in Queens, it added the V train along Queens Boulevard, where the E, F, R and G already ran. But that meant too many trains for too few tracks, so one train had to go, and it ended up being the G, which had its route cut almost in half. Of course, an uproar ensued among its riders. And so a concession was made: the train would continue to run its full route weekends and nights, and it would also run more frequently, particularly during busy times.

Except there was another problem. To run more frequently, the G needed more trains, but there were not enough on hand. So the solution was to cut the trains from six cars to four, sticking all the leftover cars together to make extra trains. While on paper this means more trains, it seems to riders that it means only more of them, packed into smaller trains.

And, more importantly for explaining the G-train sprint, it means that on a platform designed to be filled by an eight-car, 600-foot train, the ones that show up now are only 300 feet long. Back in December, when the change was first made, paper signs were posted on platform columns to let riders know where these truncated trains would stop. But the signs are gone now and for people unfamiliar with the line, the wind sprints have begun.

“I was at Bergen Street one day, and it looked like the burning of Atlanta in ‘Gone With the Wind,'” said Gene Russianoff, a lawyer for the Straphangers Campaign who lives along the G line in Brooklyn. “There were all these people flooding down the platform in waves.”

Patti Choi, a member of the Noble Street Block Association in Greenpoint, has been riding the G train so long she remembers when it was called something else. She looked imploringly at a conductor yesterday as a few of the weaker runners barely managed to make his train at the Greenpoint Avenue station. The conductor shrugged as the train pulled away. “I waited for them, right?” he said. “You saw me waiting.”

Eddy Rodriguez and John Marshall barely made it. Before the train came, they had been chewing the fat on a bench that was a relic of a more genteel past: The trains don't stop there anymore.

“You write down this: ‘We want our train back,'” said Mr. Rodriguez, wearing a jacket with the word “Bulldog” written in capital letters on the back, running down the platform with a cup of coffee and a bad limp. “Did you write that down?”

—ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED APRIL 9, 2002

RIDING FOR TWO

It is a familiar refrain that September 11 showed not only the world but even New Yorkers themselves how nice they could really be. They gave time and money and food. They gave Caribbean cruises to firefighters. They gave rides to perfect strangers trying to get home that horrible day.

But a recent impromptu investigation has found that there is still at least one thing most New Yorkers will not give to anyone, under any circumstances, even in this renaissance of compassion: a seat on a crowded subway train.

To conduct the investigation, a suitable seat-seeker was quickly found: Rebecca Hunter, 32, Brooklynite, professional woman and proud subway rider who also happens to be seven months pregnant and among the most extremely uncomfortable of the uncomfortable riders on the F, A and C trains, the three Ms. Hunter takes to work in the West Village.

Over the last seven months, Ms. Hunter's sense of subway topography has changed with each trimester, and to see the system through her eyes now is to see it much differently. It is to realize that there are no air-conditioning vents near the ends of F train cars, so that even when it is less crowded there, Ms. Hunter gets on in the middle, where it is cooler.

It is to notice that there are few benches on the long platforms at the Jay Street station in Brooklyn, and that the F comes into West Fourth Street in Manhattan two levels down, a long hike for a woman carrying far more than a briefcase.

Most of all, though, it is to understand the casual lack of courtesy on rush-hour trains, badly hidden behind newspapers, novels and supposedly sleepy eyelids.

Ms. Hunter, an Internet producer, said she did not mind it when she was less far along. She would see sympathetic people looking at her nervously and she knew what they were thinking: “Is she pregnant or does she just need to lay off the burgers?”

Later on, though, as her midsection grew and her feet began to ache, she would wrinkle her nose politely at someone staring and mouth the words, “Yes, I am pregnant,” longing for the seat.

Now, there is no mistaking, and no excuses remain for those sitting around her. “Sometimes,” she says, “people will have conversations with me when they're sitting and they'll say, ‘So, how far along are you?' and I'm thinking, ‘I'm far enough along that you should get up!'”

Ms. Hunter, who came to New York from Boston by way of Arizona two years ago, does not think that a seat is her right, the way it should be for the disabled and the elderly. She simply thinks it is a nice thing for people to give her. She did it before she was pregnant. Her husband, David, does it.

At 8:30 the other morning on the F train from Brooklyn, no one was doing it.

There was a young man hunched intently over a loud electronic game. There was a young woman hunched intently over the novel “Me Times Three,” oddly appropriate because that is the way Ms. Hunter feels right now.

There was another man who looked promising. “He looked like he might have been a hippie in college and maybe he had some feminist leanings,” Ms. Hunter said later. As it turned out, he had no such leanings. She rode for four stations—conspicuously turning her prominent abdomen, draped in a bright pink shirt. Finally someone got up, but only to leave the train.

Over the last weeks, Ms. Hunter has made her own accounting of subway politeness, complete with percentages. A quarter of the time, someone gives her a seat, like the nice young woman with the cat glasses last Thursday morning. A quarter of the time, she gets a seat through dumb luck or “through my own cunning”—watching for vacancies and positioning herself like a bobcat crouched for prey. Half the time, there are no seats and no offers.

Ms. Hunter says that on the lines she rides from her neighborhood, Windsor Terrace, women make up 90 percent of the seat-givers, and young Hispanic men are also very generous. By and large, everyone else falls into the category of great disappointment.

Standing, she longs to hear these people's internal rationalizations, and recently she did, sort of. In a subway chat room, there was a discussion of subway etiquette in which a man who called himself Davy opined that pregnant women should not be riding crowded trains anyway.

Ms. Hunter showed considerable restraint in her response. “Let's see. Why do I ride the train at such a crowded time?” she wrote. “Because I have a job. Because in order to live in this city, my husband and I both need jobs.” She added, “Do you have a job where you can just come and go as you please? If so, please do me a favor and pass my résumé along.”

Yesterday morning, standing, on the way to her job where she cannot come and go as she pleases, she said she had made a new resolution.

“I am going to start asking people to get up,” she said. “I've decided.”

—ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED APRIL 30, 2002

POLE-HUGGERS

Of the many breaches of that vast, elaborate and unwritten code of conduct known as the Rules of New York City Subway Etiquette, pole-hugging has long been lumped among the lesser offenses.

It certainly does not deserve the kind of high-pitched and near-violent censure set aside for door-blockers, those who ride in doorways and move for no one. It is not nearly as willful as rushing (entering a car before riders inside can exit) or as oblivious as stopping (entering a car and lingering at the threshold, while dozens behind you try to get in). In the end, its consequences are probably not as serious as either leg-spreading (riders, mostly men, sitting like catchers behind home plate) or bag-sitting (riders, mostly women, storing their recent purchases on the seat next to them).

But there seems to be a growing movement among subway etiquette jurists—or at least among the dozen or so people who were recently found at random on trains across the city and interviewed—that a reclassification of pole-hugging may be in order.

Properly defined, of course, pole-hugging is one of two subcategories under the general offense of pole-hogging, which also includes pole-leaning. But the results are the same: the vertical poles inside subway cars, intended to be gripped by as many as five or six hands on a crowded train, are instead monopolized by one body, which tends to be large and perspiring heavily. Often, the body is reading a newspaper and leaning against the pole as if it were in a small-town barbershop. Sometimes, the body wraps the pole in its arms like an old waltzing partner. Occasionally, the body is doing the one-armed hug or the one-shoulder lean—less serious but still taking up wildly undemocratic amounts of pole space.

It could be that trains are much more crowded now, and pole space is at a premium. It could be that the offense of pole-hugging, overlooked for so many years, has simply grown unchecked. Whatever the reason, the consensus is that it should be discouraged much more vigorously, and that there are many ways to do it.

Aida Melendez favors the wrist method, considered one of the best. The hand is inserted between the pole and the offender firmly, and then the wrist is given a hard snap to cause discomfort to the offender. “It's passive-aggressive, like everything in the subway,” said Ms. Melendez, a nurse from Park Slope, Brooklyn. “Except it's more aggressive than passive.”

She added that if the offender still does not budge, she adds the additional and sometimes effective technique of “sucking my teeth and rolling my eyes.”

Large rings, bracelets and watches make the wrist method even more effective. But Stephanie Leveene, an editor who rides the N, R, 4 and 5 trains, counsels that true opponents of pole-huggers must be willing to go the distance with them. “They don't want the hand in their back,” she said. “But sometimes they won't move and I won't move, and we just ride like that, all the way.”