Subwayland (5 page)

The station nearest his town house on East 79th Street in Manhattan is the 77th Street station, which means that, even among subway riders who feel themselves beleaguered by crowding, Mr. Bloomberg has joined the vanguard of the oppressed, the Lexington line riders, whose morning trains are usually the most packed in the city.

Last Thursday morning, the mayor left his house a little after 7 with his beige overcoat buttoned to beneath the knot on his maroon tie, like a well-heeled Cheever character. He stopped off for a cup of coffee and swiped his MetroCard through the turnstile. He usually gets to the station at least an hour earlier, but he had decided that morning to mix some campaigning into his trip, stumping at the station for a fellow Republican, Assemblyman John Ravitz, who is running for State Senate in a coming special election.

The 77th Street station can be chaotic enough on a slow day, so the campaigning showed the mixed blessing of having a mayor as a fellow straphanger. It is possible that your station might be a little cleaner than before, but it is also possible that you will enter the station to have a man yell three times into your ear as you go through the turnstile: “Say hello to the mayor of New York City and Assemblyman John Ravitz!”

At a little after 8, the mayor, his bodyguards and a group of aides and reporters made their way to the platform. A No. 6 train pulled up that appeared far too crowded to enter, but Mr. Bloomberg plunged ahead like a linebacker, positioning himself in a corner near the conductor's cab, where he was less likely to get jostled. (He points out that he is no subway neophyte; during the 15 years when he worked for Salomon Brothers, he took the train every day. “And that was back before air-conditioning,” he stresses.)

On the way to Grand Central, where he jammed himself into an even more crowded No. 4 train, Mr. Bloomberg chatted with a seated elderly woman after the surging crowd shoved him up next to her. “God bless you,” she said, appearing a little flustered to find herself suddenly knee-to-knee with the chief executive of her city.

The woman sitting next to her was more representative of the true spirit of the subway. Sleeping, she cracked one eye open, appeared annoyed that there was so much talking going on, and promptly fell back to sleep.

Gilbert Cruz, a property manager who was standing next to the mayor, beamed. “Look at him,” he said. “He's interacting with the public, no problem.”

—ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JANUARY 22, 2002

AROUND THE WORLD IN 40 HOURS (OR “I CAN'T BELIEVE I'M DOING THIS”)

At 6 a.m. yesterday, a 17-year-old Brooklyn high school student named Harry Beck got on the subway.

If you are reading this before noon today, there is a good chance that Harry Beck is still on the subway, probably somewhere beneath Brooklyn or Queens, badly in need of sleep, with a sore back, a weak cell phone battery, a ringing in his ears and a subway map on which most of the lines have been inked over in blue ballpoint pen.

The pen marks mean that Mr. Beck has traversed these lines sometime during the previous 24 hours, and if he is lucky—if he has not been stranded in a stalled train or accosted by gangs of high school bullies or fallen asleep on a bench at Coney Island—he will be close to marking off the last line on the map, and ending a very, very long subway ride.

Most people take the train to get to work. Mr. Beck is taking it, more or less, to get to college.

In truth, there were easier research projects he could have conducted to complete his senior thesis at the Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn Heights, near where he lives. But Mr. Beck loves the subway, its history, its mythology and its minutiae, with the kind of love many teenagers reserve for their headphones and their girlfriends. (He even runs his own subway Web site, and in his bedroom, plugged into the wall, is a real, working subway signal.)

So, he thought, why not attempt the transit Everest—468 stations, 230 route miles, 30 to 40 hours, Van Cortlandt Park to Rockaway Park, with everything in between—and see if someone would give him school credit for it, too.

“I mean, some kids are writing about French cuisine or ‘This is me going skiing every weekend at my country house,'” he said yesterday, in Hour 4 of the project. “I like riding the subway. So why can't I do that?”

As a literary exercise, it was not the first subway endurance test. The novelist Paul Theroux once spent a week riding the system from end to end, and imparted his most important survival technique, given to him by a friend: “You have to look as if you're the one with the meat cleaver.” (This was in 1982.)

As a research venture, Mr. Beck's trip was not exactly Darwin aboard the Beagle, although he did decide to take pictures and notes and to count the homeless people he came across on his journey (10 by 10 a.m. yesterday, on 11 different trains). Mr. Beck also decided not to try to break the world record for navigating the whole subway in the least number of hours, which now hovers down in the low 20's.

Yesterday at about noon, however, he was thinking that perhaps he should have. He was growing a little fatigued. He had tried to get a good night's sleep the night before the trip, and had even swallowed two allergy pills to knock himself out, but he was far too revved up and finally drifted off at 4 a.m., an hour before he had to get up.

“I can't believe I'm doing this, actually, now that I think about it,” he reported at about Hour 6, sitting on a No. 2 train, across from a woman watching him suspiciously as he wrote in his subway notebook. “I mean, what a
weird
thing to do.”

Mr. Beck does not look the part of what transit workers call a foamer, meaning someone who loves the subway so much that he appears rabid when discussing it. He has long, black, rock ‘n' roll sideburns and was traveling with a Weezer CD in his portable stereo yesterday, packed into his green knapsack along with $27 in cash, two bottles of water, gum, breath mints, nose drops, eyedrops, a radio scanner, gloves, a cell phone, his typed-out itinerary and two books for a class he is taking called “Death and Dying.” (“It's pretty much a big downer, that class,” he said.)

Of himself, Mr. Beck said, “I'm not king popularity, but I'm not a loner either, like some subway guys. I'm not getting beat up in school or anything because I like subways.” His physics teacher, Flo Turkenkopf, confirmed this. She says he knows there are things he loves that make him a geek, “but he has a sense of humor about it all.”

The school's administrators and Mr. Beck's parents, a psychologist and a former teacher, had less of a sense of humor about his plans to skip two days of school to do something that usually lands other teenagers in a truancy office.

But they were eventually persuaded after Mr. Beck explained the valuable lessons he would be learning in sociology and urban affairs. Plus, he agreed to schedule in lunch and dinner breaks and have a teacher ride along with him overnight.

Reached last night by cell phone somewhere on the L train, Mr. Beck reported that he was faring well, that he had passed through about 230 stations or almost half and, as a bonus, had seen many good-looking young women on their way home to Williamsburg.

Next, he said, he was headed back to Brooklyn to eat dinner at his house. “You know, for my mom,” he said, unconvincingly. “To calm her down.”

—ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 26, 2002

MASS-TRANSIT MOSES

When people speak of having a bad subway day, it is generally understood that the day in question took place in the subway.

For Anthony Trocchia, this is not the way it works.

In fact, he explains, having trouble in the subway—on a subway train, dare he dream—would be a minor victory, something to be savored while stuck in the tunnel.

It was just after 9 a.m. yesterday, and he was explaining this in a humid corner of the Jamaica Center subway station, laughing the way people sometimes laugh to emphasize how thoroughly unfunny something is.

This was because Mr. Trocchia had found himself, once again, feeling a little like Moses.

Not to conflate subway platforms with the promised land, but if you make your way around New York in a wheelchair, as Mr. Trocchia does, and you would like to do so in the subway—using the 38 stations that transit officials have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars over the last decade to make accessible for disabled riders—reaching the platform is the minimum requirement.

Mr. Trocchia would not be able to do that yesterday morning. He would look down a short staircase and see the platform stretching out in front of him. He would see the E train pulling in. Then he would look at the elevator door in front of him, the one with the ragged red plastic tape stretched in front of it.

And he would slowly turn his motorized wheelchair around for a trip back to the street.

“Welcome to my life,” he said, “and all its dysfunction.”

In the interest of full disclosure, Mr. Trocchia, 33, who has muscular dystrophy and has been unable to walk since he was 11, is not just any guy in a wheelchair trying to use the subway. He is president of an advocacy group, Disabled in Action of Metropolitan New York, and he had invited a reporter to meet him in Jamaica yesterday to explore the workings, or nonworkings, of the subway from the perspective of a wheelchair seat.

He had not set out hoping to find dysfunction. In fact, Mr. Trocchia—who regularly rides city buses and says they work very well for passengers in wheelchairs—had chosen one of the most accessible stretches in the subway, three stations in a row along the E line in Jamaica.

Before he left his home in Brooklyn, he had called the New York City Transit hotline that provides information about broken elevators and had learned that no problems had been reported at any of the three stations. Indeed, at Jamaica Center around 9, it seemed as if things had improved since the last time he had tried, and failed, to use the subway: The elevator from the street worked when he pushed the button. (Mr. Trocchia rolled into it with the caution born of experience. “You never know what the odor du jour is going to be,” he warned.)

But the mezzanine, and the all-too-literal red tape stretched across the entrance, turned out to be a harbinger for the rest of the morning.

Stoically patient, cracking jokes in a musical voice, Mr. Trocchia made his way back to the street and rolled eight blocks down Archer Avenue to the Sutphin Boulevard station, which is listed as being wheelchair accessible on New York City Transit's Web site. And indeed, in theory, one might concede that it is accessible, except that the elevator is in the middle of a construction project and has been shut down for several months.

Mr. Trocchia began buttonholing employees to see if they knew of another elevator, but his questions were met mostly with blank stares. A helpful New York State Police officer offered to get a partner and carry the wheelchair down the stairs, until he was told that it weighed 300 pounds. “Oh,” he said, and then added, when asked about the elevator situation, “I have no official comment.”

Mr. Trocchia rolled on. (“Thank God for Paxil,” he said.)

His last attempt of the day was made at the Jamaica–Van Wyck Station, where the elevator was working but the button at street level was not. Mr. Trocchia waited for the elevator to be brought up from the mezzanine, where the button did work. But upon reaching the platform—at 10:20, more than an hour after he started trying to take the subway—he was finally defeated by the obstacle he had known he would find all along. The thresholds of the arriving trains were about 4 inches higher than the platform, making it almost impossible for Mr. Trocchia to enter the train without his chair flipping over backward. A platform riser, which has been installed in some other accessible stations, was absent at Van Wyck, meaning that the elevator did little more than provide a meaningless sightseeing trip down to the platform.

Mr. Trocchia, smiling a little sarcastically, mentioned that an elevator was scheduled to be installed in the subway station nearest to his home in Williamsburg. “I think it's supposed to be done in 2012,” he said, smile widening. “I guess I'll put my plans on hold until then.”

—ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JULY 23, 2002

RESIDENT COMIC

It has been one of the longest-running performances in the history of the subway.

Nearly every morning and evening for the last 12 years, from the depths of winter to the dog days of summer, a very bitter, disturbed and funny man named Carl Robinson has taken the stage at a narrow, overcrowded theater otherwise known as the subway station at Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street.

The morning show begins with the rush. The evening show can last until midnight. Sometimes there is singing, but usually there is just the stentorian voice of Mr. Robinson, booming out a monologue that falls somewhere between scabrous stand-up comedy and postmodern performance art. On good days, it is reminiscent of early George Carlin. On bad days, especially when Mr. Robinson recalls the many women who seem to have wronged him, the material veers toward late Lenny Bruce and commuters tend to veer away from him.

But even those who are not fans of Mr. Robinson (and he has his share of very angry critics) have come to think of him over the years as an institution at their station, as inseparable from it as the subterranean funk or the steep escalators.

So last Monday, when the morning rush arrived and Mr. Robinson was not there to greet it, some people began to wonder. Tuesday passed without him, then Wednesday, and rumors began to swirl on the platform and in nearby offices that he had been attacked or struck by a train.

“Everyone is thinking he is dead,” said Mohemmed Khan, who manages the station's newsstand and stood in it yesterday shaking his head sadly. “Every day, thousand people and thousand people more ask me, ‘Where is Carl? What happened to Carl?'”

Sybil Ferere, an administrator at a nearby brokerage firm who has given Mr. Robinson food and money for years (he does not panhandle), said that by midweek she was so worried she called the police. “I just couldn't believe that Carl wouldn't be there to talk to us every day,” she explained. “I had to find him.”