Subwayland (7 page)

“Wow,” he observes, pausing to consider this fact. “I really
am
crazy.”

If so, Mr. Kronenberg is the kind of crazy many New Yorkers long to be. In a city filled with people who live to work, often to their detriment, he has carefully worked only enough to live exactly the kind of life he wants to live. (For the last nine years, he has been a math tutor, “yet another in my line of underachieving careers,” he says with sheepish pride.)

This painstaking reduction of ambition has allowed Mr. Kronenberg, in a city teeming with part-time buffs of everything from egg creams to elevators, to become something of a rarity: a full-time buff.

He might not know the names of every kind of subway car to have rumbled beneath the city, as some buffs seem to. He might not be able to describe in excruciating detail, as some can, how the Chrystie Street connection severed the Nassau Street Loop in 1967.

But Mr. Kronenberg, 58, is still believed to be the only man in the five boroughs who has collected the salvaged parts of an old subway car and, adding only lumber and dark-olive paint, built a highly faithful mock-up of a motorman's cab in his own bedroom, complete with controls, windows, a folding gate, an express sign and a hand-operated windshield wiper. You might think of it as the subway version of the Johnny Cash song, “One Piece at a Time,” about an auto factory worker who assembles a Cadillac from spare parts.

“When I show it to people,” Mr. Kronenberg says of his creation, “right away they know that I'm not married.”

He built the cab more than two decades ago, while working as a driver for a Brooklyn company called the Brighton Laundry, which had a plant near the huge Coney Island subway yard.

The process of getting the parts was, he recalls, only slightly more complex than it might be today if they showed up on eBay, though far less legal: “They were selling off all the old cars for scrap and there was this young foreman. Basically, you'd go up to the door and tell him what you wanted and he'd tell you what he wanted, you know; and you'd come to some sort of agreement.”

Today, the cab shares Mr. Kronenberg's cluttered blue bedroom along with an old Fairbanks, Morse tube radio, a reproduction of George Tooker's famously creepy painting “The Subway” and shelves full of books on topics ranging from existentialism to “How to Survive Your Parents.”

He said the cab has been sitting there so long, at the foot of his single bed, that he notices it no more than he would an old Barcalounger. So he is always a little surprised by visitors' startled reactions to it.

“I tend not to show it to people right away,” he admits, “because I'm afraid that it might freak them out.”

This solicitude, though, appears to have more to do with courtesy than real fear of what people might think of Mr. Kronenberg, who said he long ago made peace with the fact that he was paddling up a tributary far from the mainstream.

Or as he put it, his eyes twinkling through the thick glasses that make him look a little like the cartoonist R. Crumb: “I have no image problem. I don't take myself seriously enough to have one.”

After delving over the years into other odd areas of research—old radios, Greyhound buses, cash registers and Otis elevators—Mr. Kronenberg said last week he had found two new ones that might help supplant his subway obsession.

One is Skee-Ball, the old-fashioned arcade game, a version of which he is considering building intact in his living room. The other, he says, smiling, is a very nice woman from Texas, whom he met recently and who seems to appreciate some of the very things he appreciates.

He is still uncertain, however, whether a motorman's cab, a Skee-Ball alley and a new woman friend are completely compatible in the life of just one Brooklyn man. “Something might have to go.”

—ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 5, 2002

THE SAW MAN

It was Good Friday, and at the end of the Union Square subway station near the police office, the one-man ministry of Moses E. Josiah, maestro of the musical saw, was getting under way.

He was playing one of his favorite instruments, a 28-inch, two-octave solid steel tenor saw made by the Mussehl & Westphal specialty saw company of East Troy, Wis., whose newspaper advertisements once encouraged musically inclined readers to “amaze your friends with this sensation of radio, vaudeville, orchestra and lodge.”

Since its heyday in the 1930's, the saw has mostly disappeared from those forms of musical entertainment. A couple of the forms have disappeared as well. But Mr. Josiah, who taught himself to play his father's handsaw at 17 in a village on the coast of Guyana, has never wavered in his devotion to the haunting powers of a humble household tool.

It might no longer show up much in soaring concert halls, he says, but the saw is perfect for that vast musical venue known as the New York City subway, for several reasons. Among them: it is easy to carry, it is hard to break, it does not have a high resale value and not many people realize that beautiful music can be played on a handsaw, making it a great crowd pleaser.

But the best reason of all is that the sound is wonderfully subway-proof. While guitars, saxophones and even trumpets lose decisively in decibel contests with approaching trains, the notes of the musical saw rise above the roar, something like the chime made by rubbing the rim of a crystal glass.

“People have told me that they can be at the other end of a station and all of the sudden they can hear me, like I'm right next to them,” he says. “They say it sounds like the voice of an angel in their ear.”

Every day that he plays, but especially on this Friday, that is the analogy Mr. Josiah is hoping his listeners will make. He hopes they will hear a holy message emanating from his saw. In the process, he also hopes that this gratifying message will make them grateful enough to throw a few more dollars into his bag. It has been a very slow winter.

“I can play the calypso, and I can play the classical,” he explained, rubbing rosin from a white box onto his worn violin bow. “I can play anything you want. But today is a sacred day, and today is for gospel.”

A reporter looking for Mr. Josiah heard him long before seeing him, picking out the sounds of the hymn “He Touched Me.” Mr. Josiah, 74, was seated on a small black folding chair, hunched slightly over the saw, which was laid across a white hand towel on his left leg.

The saw handle lay against his right leg, which moved like a violinist's fingers creating vibrato, as his right hand bowed the flat edge of the steel.

The saw, a gift, was once gold-plated, Mr. Josiah said, but the gold has mostly worn away with use. On the top of the blade, these words are engraved: “Maestro Moses Josiah, Master Sawyer.”

“I didn't give myself the name maestro,” he explained. “All over the United States and the world, that is the name they have given me. I know the Lord blessed me. This is a gift he has given me.”

As the afternoon wore on, Mr. Josiah used his gift tirelessly for several hours. He labored over “The Holy City,” and “Master, the Tempest Is Raging,” particularly appropriate just after noon, when it seemed that trains were pounding into the station, and into his head, every three seconds. By 1:30 p.m, Mr. Josiah was becoming a little disappointed that his gift was not bringing in a few more gifts of the worldly kind.

Junior Bennett, an office administrator, stopped to listen, transfixed, and gave a dollar. Ihor Slabicky, a software developer, fled from an inferior saxophone performance on the L platform and also contributed. But most of the donations were very small change, and at one point a disturbed woman even tried to give him a piece of bread.

“You know, New York is a very interesting place,” Mr. Josiah said, stopping to rest his aching left hand. “Some panhandlers—
panhandlers
—make more money in an hour than I do.”

He picked up the bow again and this time decided to venture into a few devotional tunes much more on the nonevangelical side, including “You Light Up My Life,” and “Danny Boy.” At one point, he turned off the tape player he used to accompany him and did a slow, ethereal rendition of “God Bless America.”

“I like to call that version saw-cappella,” he said, smiling.

But the biggest crowd pleaser was decidedly his version of “Imagine,” by John Lennon, whose lyrics he either did not know or chose to ignore the meaning of. The song drew applause, a handful of dollars and the adoration of a woman who swayed to the music and sang. “Yeah,” she said.

Before the reporter left that day, Mr. Josiah thanked him but then called out: “As the Bible says, it's more blessed to give than to receive. Now I know you're not going to leave here without giving a little something, are you?”

—ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED APRIL 22, 2003

SUBWAY WHIZ KIDS

At least by the age of 4, and at least in New York City, children have already begun to emulate their parents in one very noticeable way: they, too, have cultivated obsessions.

For most children, these obsessions tend to be the ones of sunny youth, circa 2003, ranging from Harry Potter to pterodactyls, from Spider-Man to highly specialized science kits. (“What are the basic ingredients of soda pop?”)

But for a much more single-minded group of single-digit New Yorkers, there is an obsession far weightier and a list of questions vastly more difficult. So difficult, in fact, that most adult residents of this city will consider them only under duress. For example: When does the Z train run and what is its last stop in Manhattan? Will the W train terminate at Whitehall Street next year? How many connections can you make from the Franklin Avenue shuttle? What is the only subway line that does not go into Manhattan?

To answer these questions and many more, let us introduce our three panelists today on “It's a Subway Whiz Kid.” In order of age, they are Alexander Puri of the Upper East Side, who will be 5 next month and whose favorite subway line (at least this week) is the B. Next is Aidan Langston of Park Slope, Brooklyn, who turned 6 last month and is bold enough to favor the V train, making him probably its only fan. Finally, there is Jonah Gaynor, 6, who lives in Greenwich Village and is particularly partial to the G. The three have joined us today because they represent a special class of highly intelligent and high-achieving urban children: They are the smallest subway buffs. Still almost short enough to sprint under a turnstile without bumping their heads, they have forgotten more about the subway than most MetroCard-carrying adults have ever known.

In other cities, children with such an aptitude for geography and transportation might be able to identify different types of S.U.V.'s or navigate the megamall. In New York, subway whiz kids are more helpful: they can tell you how to get from Middle Village, Queens, to Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, in only two transfers.

And this knowledge does not come without hard work. It involves hours of late-night reading. “At 3 years old, in the same way some kids take teddy bears to bed, he was taking the subway map to bed and studying it,” said Sandeep Puri, Alexander's father, watching his son the other day as he sat in rapt concentration in the middle of an oversize subway map.

Being a bona fide subway whiz kid also involves untiring field work. Alan Gaynor, an architect, and his wife, Sharon Silbiger, a doctor, have taken Jonah to more than 50 stations. They have explored the wonders of the L line and the joys of the routes to Coney Island. They have twice taken the express bus to Staten Island, just to take it back again. “There are some times,” his father reports admiringly, “he's forced me to go to Queens and we've never gotten out of the subway.”

As his mother explained, “It's not the destination. It's the process.”

She quickly added of her husband and herself, who are not untiring, “For us, the destination is part of the process.”

Aidan Langston's father, Chris, who works for a health-care foundation, often enjoys playing Watson to his son's Sherlock on such fact-finding trips. But the other day, in the family's house in Brooklyn, he asked a quite dangerous question: If Aidan could choose any route from school in Chinatown back home to Brooklyn, what would it be?

His son did not hesitate. His ideal trip, he said, would be to take the F from East Broadway to the Forest Hills stop in Queens, then transfer to the V, ride that to Second Avenue on the Lower East Side and then catch the F at that station back home to Park Slope. (Note to non–New Yorkers: This is like going from Dallas to Detroit by way of Honolulu.)

There was a moment of stunned silence in the house, followed by a burst of adult laughter—laughter tinged with the knowledge that someone would undoubtedly be making that long journey someday soon, because he would insist. (Aidan's mother, a New York Times reporter, was once scolded by her son for eating a knish on the subway. The rules, he reminded her, forbid eating.)

Parents of subway buff children—the buffs are overwhelmingly boys—say that they see the transit system as an excellent teaching tool for a city child. After all, the subway involves colors and numbers and letters. It involves rules and geographical facts and hard-to-pronounce words, like Sutphin Boulevard and Mosholu Parkway.

But for the subway whiz kid, there is a much bigger attraction: knowing more than anyone else, particularly the parents. Like little Jedi knights, the buffs tend to get the Force and then quickly humble their elders. This group includes transit reporters for large metropolitan daily newspapers.

One recently made the mistake of asking Aidan Langston when the Z train ran.

“Only rush hours,” he replied.

“What about weekends?” the reporter asked.

Aidan looked weary and disappointed, as if he'd explained this a thousand times. “Are there rush hours on weekends? I don't
think
so.”

—ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED MAY 27, 2003