Subwayland (23 page)

“At the beginning,” said Ms. Cugini, laughing, “we are very confused.”

So are many others, and not just at the beginning.

“The joke going around when these things were first installed,” said Larry Furlong, an amateur subway historian, “was that green meant go in, red meant don't.”

“And yellow meant take a cab.”

—ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AUGUST 13, 2002

THE SINGLES CAR

It would have taken a great deal of poetic license last Friday night to describe the first car of the Manhattan-bound F train as a happening place, the place to meet that special someone.

Just after 7, as the car rumbled out of the 15th Street station in Brooklyn, there were exactly eight people aboard. Among them was a big man in a tropical shirt with a long white beard, looking something like Santa Claus in a Jimmy Buffett suit. Across the aisle was a little boy with his head in his mother's lap, and a few seats away a man snored, annoying an already annoyed-looking girl in a torn Smiths T-shirt.

Apparently, these people had not received the official notification, the one sent out by e-mail nearly a month ago now:

“As of today, Wednesday, August 14,” it read, “the first car of every subway train running in New York City's five boroughs is hereby declared THE SINGLES CAR: A free zone for unattached New Yorkers to meet the commuter of their dreams. Please ride accordingly, and work that $1.50!”

True, this declaration was issued with no more authority than you would have if you declared that the first car of your morning train was henceforth your own private hospitality suite.

True, the declaration was made not by New York City Transit or anyone official but by a group no one had ever heard of, a vaguely utopian-sounding collective with a British spelling, the Organisation for Better Underground Living.

And true, the only three members of this group—a 31-year-old Manhattan graduate student, Christine Prentice; a 28-year-old Brooklyn architect, Marshall Brown; and a 31-year-old Brooklyn writer and editor, Mark Schwartz—had convened its first and only meeting last month while drinking together in a Park Slope bar.

But in a world where perception can drive reality as surely as the motorman drives the F train, the declaration—sent to about 250 friends and colleagues of the three—seems to be acquiring a strange kind of legitimacy based solely on the fact that someone thought to declare it.

Over the last three weeks, the threesome have been interviewed everywhere from CNN to Newsweek. And their oddly romantic idea seems to be picking up speed internationally as well, with reporters from Ottawa and Dutch television tracking them down.

“It was like, we sent this kind of funny e-mail out to a bunch of our friends,” Mr. Schwartz said. “And then a week later, it's on Fox. I mean, how strange is that?”

Without seeking it or even wanting it much, the three friends are getting the kind of attention that some people pay public relations experts vast sums of money to try to get. And all for a simple idea that Ms. Prentice hoped would maybe land her a date and, in the process, remind people not to lose the kind of openness that suffused the city after September 11.

“It seemed that by Christmas, a lot of that was going away,” she said. “It was really making me sad.”

The fact that lots of people have heard about the singles car makes her very happy. But what would make her and Mr. Brown and Mr. Schwartz immeasurably more happy is if the idea would actually start filling the front cars of trains with lots and lots of great-looking, friendly men and women who would walk up to them and smile and say the secret password that they suggested for the single straphanger in the know:

“Excuse me, is this train going
downtown
?”

Last Friday, on the F line, this was not happening, exactly.

Ms. Prentice and Mr. Brown were aboard as anonymous investigators, looking around the front car, hopefully, as the train made its way from the East Village to Park Slope, territory that should have been prime recruiting ground for the Organisation for Better Underground Living.

Mr. Brown spotted two blond women in short black skirts and long black eyelashes who seemed to be on their way to a party. Could it be that the party was the one they had hoped to find here, in the singles car?

If so, it was hard to tell. The two women did not ask anyone if the train was headed downtown—wink, wink—and they sashayed off at Jay Street in Brooklyn without so much as a smile in anyone's direction.

But Mr. Brown's hopes seemed as high as ever. As the train ascended the elevated tracks in Carroll Gardens and the setting sun streamed into the car, he looked out over the Hudson and saw the Statue of Liberty silhouetted against the horizon.

“Now this is romance,” he said, mostly seriously. “This is the moment when you strike.”

As the train headed back into Manhattan with the snorer and the Santa Claus and the sleeping boy aboard, Mr. Brown admitted, “I guess we're still sort of waiting for our watershed moment.”

Ms. Prentice helped him to define this. “The watershed moment is going to be when I meet someone on the train that I want to go out on a date with,” she said. “That's when it's going to be.”

—ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 10, 2002

WAITING ON A TRAIN

If you are standing on a subway platform in London or Barcelona or Washington and wondering when the next train will arrive, there is generally no great effort involved in finding out: look up at the colorful screens, the ones that want you to have a nice day, and watch as the electronic seconds count down to your ride.

In New York, characteristically, much more talent is required.

The most popular methods are, of course, the platform lean and the long tunnel stare, timeless images of urban impatience.

Experienced commuters usually combine the stare with a subway distance technique that may have some relation to the sonar used by bats and which can help predict the proximity of the train simply from the size of its distant headlights.

And true veterans take into account even more esoteric signs—the metallic pings of the tracks, the fetid breezes and the scurrying mice, which are the canaries of the mass-transit coal mine. In the end, though, even the most talented train spotter can misread these signs and watch sadly along the local track as an express blows by.

So now, as New York City Transit draws up a new contract and prepares yet again to find a company to tow it into the electronic information age, there is hope that—finally, this time—these subway tracking skills will be rendered vestigial.

For more than a decade, the agency has been trying to join its more technologically advanced counterparts and install a computer system that will allow train dispatchers to know something that most riders might be disturbed to learn the dispatchers do not already know: exactly where the trains are.

In many ways, the system still works much as it did when the subway opened: the wheels and axles of the trains cause a short circuit along a section of running rail, illuminating a little red light on a big black map in a tiny room deep within the heart of the subway. This tells dispatchers where a train is, sort of, but not which train it is, exactly.

In fact, the train is positively identified only when it comes into the station and subway workers lay eyes on it and jot down its car numbers on a handwritten sheet. A train supervisor once described this system as “kind of like watching the minute hand on a clock.”

“It doesn't give you a lot of details,” he said.

If the professionals do not have the details, they cannot very well pass them on to the passengers, and so far the agency has had huge trouble—partly through its own oversights, critics say—in finding a company to help it build a system to collect those details.

Its first effort to put passenger information screens into the system envisioned them being in 137 of the system's 468 stations. It ended up putting them in only 51. And most of those screens are not tied into a central computer, meaning that they are sometimes manually operated and of little use in delivering accurate, real-time train information.

“It usually is just a generic message that says ‘It's pickpocket season!' or ‘Have a nice day!' or ‘Yada, yada, yada,'” said Paul Fleuranges, a spokesman for the agency. Karl Steel, an official in charge of finding a better system, added yesterday, “One of the lessons we learned is that if you're giving wrong information, then sometimes it's better not to do it at all.”

The agency insists that it does want to give the right information, however, and so it is now in the middle of a complex project to tie all the antiquated signal equipment on the numbered subway lines to a computer system that will track trains better and allow information to be passed to riders.

A second project will modernize the signal equipment on most of the lettered lines, which is so antiquated that it cannot even be tied into computers. And subsequent projects are to bring information screens on which the numbers “3 … 2 … 1” will usually coincide with a train pulling into the station.

Even with this in mind, it is probably not advisable to let your personal subway-tracking skills lapse just yet. If the projects go as planned—an “if” that grows larger with each failed effort—information signs will not start appearing until well after 2005.

Until then, officials say, they are simply working much harder to improve the old-fashioned system of telling people where their trains are—with humans like Robin Anderson, who sits in a control center at DeKalb Avenue in Brooklyn. Every morning, she and a handful of colleagues are the ones who stare at the little lights on the big maps and translate what they see over loudspeakers in 155 stations.

These days, most of those speakers do not sound quite as much like the teacher's voice in the Charlie Brown television specials as they once did. But some still do.

In those cases, it might be a good idea to learn a new subway-tracking skill, one advocated by Garrison Keillor when he lived in New York: upon entering the station he surveyed the platform and if it was full, he knew that a train was nigh.

“It always makes me feel good,” he said, “knowing that some of the job of waiting has been done by other people.”

—ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED OCTOBER 15, 2002

STAND CLEAR OF THE LOVE SEAT

City life, especially in New York, requires countless daily calculations involving the fundamentals of physics: space, time, mass and energy.

Can I really fit this couch into my apartment and still have enough room to live in it? Can I actually make it across six lanes of traffic on a blinking “Don't Walk”? Can I legally put a broken 27-inch television, an old microwave and an entire set of barbells into the recycling? Can I possibly remain conscious for eight hours today after sleeping only three last night?

Then there is the thorny question combining all of these elements, the one that requires the most advanced form of urban reckoning:

Can I carry it on the subway?

It is not a problem unique to this city, but it is certainly confronted here more than anywhere else in the country. Even in other cities with mass transportation, car ownership has remained high, but New York has long been an exception. According to the 2000 census, 54 percent of city households do not own or lease a car. In Manhattan, in fact, 78 percent remain carless, a virtual republic of unrepentant pedestrians.

In other words—while deliverymen and cab drivers sometimes fill the role here—the subway is this city's communal station wagon, a freight train in all but name. While other Americans may arrange their purchases neatly in capacious car trunks, New Yorkers are towing theirs mightily through the turnstiles. While other Americans may strap surfboards atop PT Cruisers, New Yorkers are dragging theirs onto the A train to Far Rockaway.

And while other Americans try to lock in a good radio station on the highway, New Yorkers are trying to figure out how to hang onto the pole in a packed train without losing control of the briefcase, the overcoat, the gym shoes, the large box of Pampers and the Big Brown Bag from Bloomingdale's.

This dilemma—balance versus baggage—has confronted subway riders virtually from the start. In late November 1905, only a year after the subway opened, The New York Times published an account of a man carrying a suspiciously large parcel wrapped in yellow paper, which fell from his arms at 72nd Street. “The crumpled top opened,” the story said, “and after a few kicks and flurries, a turkey, with an air of outraged dignity, strutted out on the floor.”

Over the last two years, in an attempt to document the phenomenon, this columnist has kept a sporadic list of the most unwieldy cargo spotted aboard subway cars. If nothing else, it shows what human willpower can still accomplish without internal combustion—in fact, with little more than a MetroCard and a strong back.

Among the entries are these:

• November 2000—A man with a dolly wheels a mahogany-brown, four-drawer dresser onto the A train at Times Square. Riders comment on how nice it is. (The dresser, not the train.)

• December 2001—A man on an N train in Sunset Park is seated, with a recently purchased Christmas tree at least eight feet tall clamped between his legs. Behind the tree he is reading a book.

• September 2002—A man and his girlfriend carry a sousaphone onto a Q train in Midtown. He carries the body around his shoulders while she holds the brass bell on her lap. A woman sitting next to them, apparently not a music lover, looks very angry.

Correspondents have also helped in this documentation, sending in their own strange cargo sightings and experiences. For example, a newspaper reporter's wife told of how she carried a nine-foot whaler's harpoon, a gift for her husband, on the train. The only real difficulty involved jamming the harpoon through the bars of a full-body turnstile, much the way that Captain Ahab might have jammed one into the ribs of the great whale. Unlike Ahab, she had some luck and caught the next train.