Subwayland (22 page)

Not the laminated kind, but ones much better and less tangible. Ones displayed bodily on the street or exchanged in conversation. Or just carried around confidently in your head.

What they consist of—in a place that is complicated, chaotic and crowded—is inside knowledge of how to bend the iron city to your will. Knowing, for example, that secret way of getting onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway without having to take Flatbush. Or, like George Costanza on “Seinfeld,” knowing where all the best unlocked office-building bathrooms are.

The subway holds out unparalleled opportunities for earning true New Yorker ID cards. But the platinum card goes only to those who know how to do something that we can call, for simplicity's sake, pre-walking.

Pre-walking involves walking to the correct place on your departure platform so that when you get off the train at your destination platform you are at the correct place to zip right through the turnstile or exit you want, allowing you to avoid the crowd and to lead the charge back up into daylight. (In other words, no more trudging behind the living dead who take half an hour to climb a set of stairs.)

Pre-walking is a quintessential true New Yorker trait because it involves not only beating crowds but also beating the clock.

“I mean, you're not doing anything except standing there waiting for the train, so you might as well do the walking then,” said Ann Krone, a St. Louis woman who has visited New York frequently for years and said she felt as if she had been admitted into some kind of secret society when she figured out pre-walking. “It felt like I was beating the system,” she said.

Skilled pre-walkers are not hard to spot if you know what you're looking for. Take the train to Roosevelt Island, for example. Watch how people tend to pack onto the second-to-last car in the evenings and then line up near the back door long before the train arrives at the station. This is because there's only one elevator out, and only about 20 people fit into it. The rest have to wait or suffer the long, slow escalator ride to daylight.

Nirmala Narine, a personal banker, is as good a pre-walker as you could hope to find. But even she was thrown off her game going home last week because transit officials were running shorter shuttle trains to Roosevelt Island during construction. Ms. Narine was in the second-to-last car, as usual, but those in the last car were closer to the elevator and she found herself the odd woman out, waiting for the next elevator.

“The shuttle screwed me up,” she said, sounding like a pro basketball player who had just missed a layup.

But it gave her time to diagram, proudly, her personal pre-walking strategy for her morning commute: Get on the train around the middle, near the escalator on the Roosevelt Island platform. This puts her out at Rockefeller Center near the right staircase to transfer quickly to a platform for an uptown B or D. When she reaches that platform, she pre-walks to a spot near a subway map stand, because she knows that spot puts her in the right place to get out at Columbus Circle near the closest staircase to her office.

Asked how long it had taken her to map all this out, she said, without missing a beat, “Maybe being late to work twice.”

Other riders have even more exacting pre-walking standards. When a request for pre-walking tales was posted on the Web site of the Straphangers Campaign last week, letters poured in with accounts, including such precise specifications as “second car, third door”; exit-closing schedules; and reminders to be careful with Nos. 2 and 3 trains because they can be different lengths.

Steve Hamill, a Web and graphics designer, and his girlfriend, Michele Bonan, a tenant organizer, were among the many who reported using geographic markers to pre-walk more professionally.

“Michele gets off at Rector Street and needs to be two benches and one map in front of our Union Street station entrance to end up at the stairs,” Mr. Hamill wrote. “Unfortunately, I have to be one bench and one movie poster back in order to be at the rear turnstile at the City Hall stop, where I work.”

In other words, pre-walking can divide. Sometimes, however, it unites.

A rider was at the 53rd Street and Lexington Avenue station last Sunday night and pre-walked, as usual, to his spot. Just as the train doors were closing, he looked up and saw that his wife was also on the platform and had pre-walked to the same spot.

“All of a sudden,” the man wrote, “it felt like our first date all over again.”

—ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JUNE 5, 2001

WHEN NATURE CALLS

Since the early 1980's, when the subway system seemed on the verge of ruin, almost everything about it has gotten better. Hundreds of miles of rusty rails have been replaced. Stations that looked like decommissioned coal mines look like stations again. Announcements have become more frequent (sometimes even intelligible!). Subway cars nearly always have lights and no longer come with “a thick layer of rectified garbage juice” applied to the floors, as Russell Baker once described them.

But sadly, at least one place in the subway has not gotten much better over the years. It is that place where you must go when you are going somewhere and realize that you have to go—really bad.

So bad, in fact, that you will squeeze past the sad, confused-looking man in the camouflage overcoat who seems to have appointed himself the palace guard at the only men's room at the 34th Street station on the Avenue of the Americas, the one without any toilet paper.

So bad that you will brave the smell inside, which is powerful enough to bring tears to the eyes of a grown man. And so bad that you are even able to ignore the message someone has scratched into the metal stall divider, announcing ominously, “I died in here.”

“I've never had to go that bad,” said Tony Hernandez, standing near the bathroom late last week and watching Camouflage Man shuffle in and out, his arms full of plastic bags. “Not in that one.”

“I've been in other ones,” he said. “But when I go in, I take a big, deep breath and then when I come out, I let it go.”

Depending on the strength of your bladder, it might be wise to develop this breathing technique. While New York City Transit does not publicize the list of the 60 or so restrooms that remain open in the subway—most were in such squalid shape that they were closed by 1982—it is often possible to find them just by following your nose.

At Union Square last Friday, the door to the women's room was wide open, allowing a fermented aroma to roll out like harbor fog. With urgent need, Aleisha Johnson started to go in but retreated before she cleared the threshold. Her boyfriend, Oston Taylor, described the odor as something “like a morgue where somebody left the dead bodies out of the freezer.”

At the 14th Street station on the Nos. 1, 2 and 3 lines, the men's room was behind a metal door that looked as if it had recently withstood a rocket attack. The door was padlocked, with a chain, and appeared not to have been opened since the Coolidge administration. A congenial conductor took out his pass key and unlocked it for a visitor, explaining that the restroom was last open to the public only a week ago.

But one night, someone decided to stuff newspapers and clothes into all of its facilities. The conductor opened the door and then backed up quickly, along with this reporter. Everything inside looked green.

“Whoa,” the conductor said. “Lordy.”

A station cleaner said that the plumbers refused to fix the situation until she mopped it up, but she was not about to mop it up until her bosses gave her “a suit.”

“You know,” she said. “A hazard suit. With boots and gloves and a mask.”

Fezlul Khan, the manager of the newsstand nearby, said he was one of the few who still had the courage to enter the restroom, but only because he had no choice. “Lot of people going in there and doing very, very bad things,” he said.

What things?

He smiled, weakly. “Oh, my friend, you know.”

In a city infamous for its lack of amenities, the subway represents undoubtedly the greatest possibility for public relief, with more than 200 restrooms built into the system, most of them in the busiest stations. But cleaning them, policing them and repairing them long ago became such a headache and financial drain for the subway that their location is now a kind of dirty secret, not included on any map or Web site and known primarily by the people who seem to live in them.

Every once in a while, these people seem to resent that the bathrooms are their residence and try to demolish them.

“I'm talking sheer vandalism just for the sake of vandalism,” said Brenda Sidberry, an assistant chief station officer for New York City Transit, who added that it was hard to say how many of the 60 restrooms on the open-restroom list were open at any given time and if so, in what condition.

Fixing just one broken toilet, pipes and all, she said, can cost up to $20,000. And hiring even part-time attendants costs much more, so the idea was dropped years ago.

Last Friday, camouflage man was doing his part to help out, serving as a stable presence at the 34th Street restroom. At about 11 a.m., he settled into a stall, bags and all, and was still there an hour later.

Bob Lovett, a dancer from Naples, Fla., dozing on a nearby bench, shrugged and said, “I'm sure he's just in there installing some toilet paper.”

—ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JUNE 11, 2002

LIGHT AT THE TOP OF THE STAIRS

Nonverbal communication has always been widespread in the subway.

There are countless varieties using the eyes alone: the eye roll, the leer, the leave-me-alone stare, the suspicious sidelong glance, and the squinting of the eyelids—the universal symbol of trying and failing to understand that purling sound coming from the public address system.

There is also a clearly enunciated body language. The aggressive elbow bend, which means, “Back up off me.” The kick in the back of the heel, for those who wander obliviously in front of you and cut you off. And of course, the satisfying shoulder check, deployed against egregious door blockers. (The all-purpose use of a certain finger, frequent among New York drivers, is rarely seen in such close quarters as the subway.)

But in addition to informal communication, those who run the subway have purposely created unwritten markers to try to ease travelers through the transit maze. Probably the most important and recognizable among these is the subway globe, the colored glass lamps perched atop the metal newel posts at most subway entrances. The globes are always the first interaction that riders have with the system, sometimes a block or more before they even enter it. The globes are part of the permanent street furniture of New York City and are supposed to serve as a kind of beacon, announcing that the subway system is intelligible, that people are in charge down there, and that they have, in the comforting words of Tom Bodett, left a light on for you.

But understanding the meaning of that light, and why it is a different color from the light on the other entrance, even though the entrances seem to be exactly the same, is another matter altogether.

While New York City Transit has made huge advances in the last few years in the art of speaking more clearly to huge numbers of harried people—polishing its Web site and ungurgling many of its loudspeakers—the globes endure as one of the city's largely untranslated hieroglyphs.

“They're kind of like a vestigial organ, left over from another century,” said Sue London yesterday, looking up at a dusty red one in Times Square.

Though it might seem as if they have been around that long, the globes have been confusing people only for about 20 years. Before that, most lights were sheathed in milky white globes, and their purpose was illumination, not information.

But in the early 1980's, mostly to try to prevent muggings, transit officials started a color-coding system to warn riders away from entrances that were closed at night. The original idea was to follow the three-color stoplight scheme: green meant that a station had a token booth that never closed; yellow meant a part-time token booth (but in some places, with a token, you could still get in through a full-body turnstile); and red meant an entrance with no booth and no way to get in (though you might be able to get out, through one-way full-body turnstiles).

As the number of words in the above description indicates, however, this system was much, much more complicated than go, slow down, stop.

So the yellow lights were discontinued a decade ago to simplify things, transit officials said, meaning that the red lights would serve the yellow lights' purpose, as well as the purpose that the red light used to serve. But then the MetroCard was introduced in 1994, meaning that many entrances that had been exit-only were equipped with full-body card-entrance turnstiles.

And then, responding to concerns that the colored lights did not give off enough light, transit officials several years ago began installing what they call “half-moons” when station entrances were rebuilt. These are globes that have a colored top half and a milky white bottom.

Junior Torres, smoking a cigarette yesterday near an entrance to the A line on Eighth Avenue and 15th Street, said confidently that he knew exactly what all the globes meant: green means always open, red means always closed, half-green means open most of the time and half-red means closed most of the time. “That's what they mean,” Mr. Torres said, though it is not what they mean at all.

Two transit workers near a 14th Street entrance allowed that they had never known just what the colors meant. And Toribio Nunez, coming out of the entrance, said he had always assumed that they were purely decorative, like lights on a Christmas tree. “I've never looked at them, to tell you the truth,” he said.

Linda Vaccari and Laura Cugini, tourists from Bologna, Italy, said they were pretty sure that the colors showed the colors of the train lines below, though, strangely, this often left them lost.