Subwayland Read online

  “I had to ask him, ‘Guy, how’d you lose your one shoe?’ He told me that he was walking and an old lady stepped on the back of his shoe and he took another step and it flew down into the subway.” (A lawyer who lives in Brooklyn once lost one of her favorite shoes—a robin’s egg–blue Miu Miu mule—in the gap between the train and platform. It was fished from the track bed but before she could retrieve it, a transit employee with no appreciation for high-end footwear threw it away. “I really, really loved it more than I have ever loved another shoe,” the lawyer said later.)

  The lost-property men are very diligent with their high-powered flashlights, and they find most things they are summoned to find. They once searched all the way from 45th Street to the 59th Street stations on the N line in Brooklyn for a single hoop earring and returned it to a very grateful owner. Sometimes, when they can’t find something, they suspect that it has probably been left in another pair of pants, but they keep looking anyway.

  Other times, they are asked to find things that they begin to suspect do not belong to the person asking for them.

  “You get someone who looks down and spots some jewelry or money or a cell phone down there, and goes and tells the token clerk it’s his,” Mr. Trischitta said. “You’ve got to be suspicious.”

  Then again, the men are also called to collect items that they cannot believe anyone would actually want back, like the 99-cent baby’s sippy cup all the way up at 125th Street in Harlem or the beach ball out near Coney Island. “When we got there, it was just a ratty piece of rubber,” Mr. Cummings recalled. “But we gave it back to the customer anyway.”

  Last Thursday was completely uneventful, with no emergencies and nothing lost. On Friday, they retrieved two cell phones and a paperback book. Yesterday, there were four emergency calls, all turning up nothing.

  What do they do, sitting in their locker room, while they wait for the calls to come? The men smiled at each other. “We all spend the time wisely, reading through our safety manuals,” Mr. Trischitta said. “Of course.”

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED MARCH 19, 2002

  THE LOVE SONG OF NOME J. POEM

  Some day it might live again, but for now the Nome J. Poem Subway Art Gallery and Comedy Club has been closed.

  Mr. Poem, 53, has been a booth clerk at the High Street station in Brooklyn Heights for about three years, working the midnight-to-8 shift. During his time there, he has become a Magic-Marker Michelangelo, decorating the white greaseboard in his booth with funny drawings and occasional goofy doggerel, usually related to the subway.

  I pledge allegiance to the MetroCard

  And the free rides for which it stands

  Unlimited, underground

  With round trips and transfers for all.

  Many early morning riders looked forward to these overnight creations. They had become a brief but reliable antidote to subway stupor. But one morning last week, instead of artwork, riders found a stark announcement on the board, in plain black marker.

  It said, “No Artwork.”

  Anne Samachson, a vice president of a Wall Street brokerage firm, talked to a clerk, and her fears were confirmed: a station supervisor had ordered an end to personal messages of any sort on the greaseboards, which are supposed to be used only for impersonal messages, like service announcements. Saddened, Ms. Samachson called this column to report what she felt was an outbreak of overactive bureaucracy.

  “It really brought a little bit of heart and soul down there,” she said of the drawings and verse. “It made walking into that disgusting subway station just a little better every day. It’s a shame to see it go away.”

  Reached by phone at home in Brooklyn last week, the curator, administrator and sole artist of the High Street subway gallery said that his creations were simply his way of making the midnight hours pass a little more quickly.

  “Basically,” he said, “from about 3 to 6, it’s just me and the turnstile jumpers and the homeless and the cops.”

  Mr. Poem—it is his honest-to-God real name, legally changed in 1975 to better reflect his creative nature—enjoys working the graveyard shift, because it frees up his days. But he says that he does need things to occupy his mind until morning.

  Sometimes, he brings in a white Fender Stratocaster with a maple neck. When it gets quiet, long after midnight, he plugs it into a battery-powered amplifier and plays until morning.

  His god is Jimi Hendrix, whose picture hangs on a calendar in the booth. But more often than Hendrix, Mr. Poem plays the blues. What better music is there, he asks, when you are sitting alone in the middle of the night underneath Brooklyn? (It is not the first time he has played in the subway; in the late 1980’s, before he was hired as a clerk, he dressed up in face paint, called himself the Blues Clown and played on station platforms. He eventually quit, he says, because the acoustics were lousy, the money was disappointing and the summer heat melted the spirit gum on his rubber nose.)

  Mr. Poem said that he had never been ordered to stop drawing before. And he was always careful to stick to light material that would not offend anyone. “No politics, no sex and no religion,” he said. “You can really get people going with those three.”

  Instead, he would write boosterish slogans about the beauty of the High Street station or protransit messages. When the subway token was discontinued in the spring, Mr. Poem drew an elaborate coffin with a token inside and wrote “R.I.P.” below, with the dates of the token’s brief life, 1953 to 2003. Another night, he drew a picture of the earth with a crude representation of North America and a line pointing to the Northeast, along with the words “You are here.”

  “Sometimes, I was on a roll,” he said, “and sometimes I was not, you know. I tried to make people smile.”

  But one station supervisor was not smiling. Two weeks ago, the supervisor—whose name Mr. Poem would rather not mention—ordered the clerks at High Street to remove all personal items from the booth and to stop posting personal messages on the boards, he said.

  “I had a set of 10 Magic Markers, all colors, and she told me that I could only keep the black one,” he said, adding that she told another clerk to remove the origami boxes he had fashioned out of used MetroCards.

  “It was all very letter of the law,” Mr. Poem said wearily.

  He explained that, under the regulations, clerks are also forbidden to listen to the radio, dim the booth lights or leave their shirttails untucked. So he stressed that he did not want to make any waves about the no-art order. He has been around New York City Transit long enough—14 years now—to know that clerks generally outlast supervisors and that if he just waits quietly for a year or two, he can probably pick up where he left off.

  Besides, he said, the supervisor did allow him to keep a small vase for a fresh-cut flower. And, so far, she said nothing at all about his Hendrix picture.

  “If that had been removed,” Mr. Poem said, “then we would have had a problem.”

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JULY 8, 2003

  3

  WILDLIFE

  The mass-transit menagerie: In addition to monkeys, turkeys, chickens, dogs, cats and snakes, pigeons sometimes take the train, too.

  PIGEONS RIDE FOR FREE

  In the annals of strange subway stories—some urban legend, some alarmingly real—there has always been a menagerie of animals.

  Stories of alligators roaming the tunnels, of pet snakes loose on trains, of rats strong enough to survive the third rail. There have been eyewitness accounts of live chickens, on their way from poultry market to soup pot, escaping from sacks and running through the cars. A beagle was once spotted transferring from express to local at Times Square, and a monkey was captured in the subway in 1960.

  But one subway animal story has been so persistent and widespread that it simply cried out to be investigated: the case of the train-riding pigeons of Far Rockaway.

  A little more than a year ago, a motorman and a conductor on the A line, which terminates at the Far Rockaway station,
swore to this reporter that it was true. They said it was common knowledge among longtime riders and those who worked on the line. Pigeons, they said, would board the trains at the outdoor terminal and step off casually at the next station down the line, Beach 25th Street, as if they were heading south but were too lazy, too fat or maybe too smart to fly.

  The inquiry into this claim began the other afternoon, when the question was put to a car-cleaning supervisor at the terminal. He appeared suspiciously nervous about the subject.

  “Oh, no,” he said. “Our trains have no pigeons.”

  But Andrew Rizzo, 44, a cleaner sweeping in a nearby train, looked around and smiled as if he were finally going to get to reveal his secret. The birds ride the trains all the time, he explained, motivated not by sloth but by simple hunger and ignorance: when the trains lay over at the terminal to be cleaned, for about 20 minutes, pigeons amble through the doors, looking for forgotten crumbs. Being pigeons, they do not understand the announcement that the train is leaving, and the doors close on them. They ride generally for one stop, leaving in a hurry as soon as the doors open again.

  “If you don’t know what’s going on,” said Mr. Rizzo, pushing his glasses up on his nose, “you’d think they knew what they were doing. It’s a little freaky.”

  Mr. Rizzo has a soft spot in his heart for pigeons, who helped him make a living in Central Park in the late 1980’s when he was less gainfully employed. He would strap tiny cups of bird feed to his arms and head and would soon be covered with pigeons, Hitchcock-style. He would put out a donation box, and pull in $200 on a good weekend. “I still feed them sometimes,” he said. “I feel bad for the little guys.” But he also admitted, “I run them out of the train. I don’t want them to make no mistakes, if you know what I mean.” Despite his efforts, they make many little mistakes, all over the floor.

  Mr. Rizzo and many of his fellow employees at the terminal have become something of amateur ornithologists. They said that pigeons—known vulgarly as air rats, more accurately as rock doves—ride trains at several outdoor terminals and stations, like the Stillwell Avenue station in Coney Island.

  Francisco Peña, a conductor on the A, said he has watched them step off his train and promptly fly all the way back to the Far Rockaway terminal. Perhaps not quite as impressive as the blue homing pigeon reported to have flown 7,200 miles from France back to Vietnam in the 1930’s. But still not bad, in Mr. Peña’s opinion.

  Frank Maynor, another car cleaner, noted how the sparrows and seagulls, also plentiful at the terminal, are never bold enough to venture into the cars. The sparrows can be seen hopping onto the threshold, looking longingly inside. The gulls loiter outside, like thugs, waiting to tear pizza crusts from the bills of unsuspecting pigeons as soon as they carry them out.

  “They shove the pigeons around,” said Mr. Maynor, disapprovingly. “But they’re going to evolve and start going into the trains, too. They’re giving up a lot of food to the pigeons.”

  On the subject of evolution, Sarah Canty, another cleaner, said she had noticed that the pigeons might be evolving themselves, into more alert straphangers. “When the bell goes off, you watch them,” she said. “They know the bell like we do.” And indeed, when the next bell rang, signaling that a train was about to depart, several pigeons could be seen high-stepping it out of the trains.

  But there are still pigeons that have either not learned or are yearning to break free from the nest. And at 10:45 yesterday morning, it finally happened: a dark, plump bird with iridescent purple feathers around its neck took a ride.

  Alone with the bird in the car was Eduard Karlov, a retired procurement officer for the United Nations.

  Mr. Karlov, originally from Moscow, glanced over at his fellow passenger and smiled. “He does not bother me, and, in fact, I find him rather amusing,” he said, adding, to his interviewer, “I cannot give you any more details with respect to pigeons, however.”

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED MARCH 5, 2002

  9 LIVES BY THE 3RD RAIL

  The search for the Fulton Street subway cat started the other day with a hopeful heart and a healthy dose of skepticism.

  For years, there have been clear signs at the station pointing to the existence of a full-time feline resident there—the suspicious absence of mice, for one, but more tellingly the tiny cans of cat food that seem to materialize behind a steel column on the downtown platform of the J and M lines.

  A morning token clerk swore that the cat was real and so did a Brooklyn psychologist (my wife), who reported having seen it on her way home from work. But the consensus among conductors was that the cat was just a figment of the imaginations of weary subway riders, particularly of the mysterious woman who left the train around dawn every weekday and carefully set out cans of food for it.

  “I think she might be … you know?” said one conductor, making the swirly finger sign at his temple. Another conductor said, “I’ve seen food there for years. I’ve never seen no cat.”

  A third said, “I kind of worry that maybe that woman is feeding a rat and she just thinks it’s a cat. You never know around here.”

  With that pleasant thought in mind, a visit was paid to the station and the investigation was formally launched. In short order, it revealed the aforesaid cat food at the edge of the platform—a can of Nine Lives Salmon Supreme Entrée, another of generic-brand chicken and rice, and some dried food, accompanied by a dish of water. It also revealed evidence of a kind of consumption that had cat, not rat, written all over it: the salmon was missing but the generic chicken and the dry food were untouched, apparently disdained.

  Carmen Figueroa and her boyfriend, Agosto Astorga, sitting on a bench nearby, continued to be dubious. “I never heard of a cat living in a subway station,” Mr. Astorga said. But just then, at around 11:15 a.m. he looked over the shoulder of his questioner and his eyes grew wide. “Oh, dude,” he said.

  “Oh my God!” Ms. Figueroa exclaimed, pointing. “Look.”

  Up and down the platform, heads turned. And behind the column where the food sat, another head also turned, a small one belonging to a distinguished, slender gray cat with dark gray stripes and a neatly washed white face, poised gracefully over the salmon. It stared intently at all the people staring in its direction, quickly took another bite and then hopped down onto the tracks, where it perched languorously atop a running rail and began to lick its paws.

  It might not have been as momentous as tracking down Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster, but for some of the station’s regulars it was a memorable event nonetheless: the Fulton Street cat had been found.

  A makeshift committee gathered near it on the platform and began to debate why it was there.

  “Maybe there’s a litter of little kittens under there somewhere,” Mr. Astorga surmised.

  Israel Nieves sized up the cat and concluded otherwise: “He is a hunter. He likes to stay here for the hunt.”

  Later, Joey Calvanico, a glazier from Brooklyn, seemed to confirm this theory. “He’s got a mouse!” he yelled, kneeling on the platform to give the play-by-play. “He’s got it under his paw!”

  Efrain Ortiz, for his part, wished that those skills could be exported to the side of the station where the No. 4 train stops. “A rat ran right into our train once,” he said, grimacing. “We need a cat like this over there.”

  In the end, no one could quite figure out why a cat would choose to live under the platform of a working subway station and spend its days lounging on the tracks, where it must rouse itself every 10 minutes or so to leap out of the way of speeding trains.

  “The only two things I know,” said Lawrence Jackson Jr., a station cleaner, “is that somehow or another, he knows not to go anywhere near the third rail. And he’s clean. He never does his business up here on the platform.”

  “Other than that, who knows about that crazy cat?” he added. “He’s a loner.”

  The only person who might have known more was the mysterious woman with the cat food, and with
the help of a diligent photographer, she was finally spotted the other morning spreading out the canned sustenance for the day.

  But even Muriel Sterbenz of Ridgewood, Queens, the primary benefactor of the Fulton Street cat for the last five years, said she could provide few answers about it, other than a fairly good idea of the sex—female—and a name, which she has bestowed herself: Schatzie, from the German word Schatz, or sweetheart.

  “I can’t figure out why Schatzie wants to stay in that subway station either,” conceded Ms. Sterbenz, a soft-spoken office worker for the State Insurance Department. “But I know one thing,” she added. “She sure wants to stay there. People have been trying to catch her for years. She’s too fast for the subway, and she’s too fast for them, too.”

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AUGUST 27, 2002

  BLIND MULES

  On this date a century ago, New York City was still a metropolis without a subway. But considerable evidence suggested that one was very, very near, and that it was trying hard to devour the city it was designed to help. For example:

  Mansions on Park Avenue between 38th and 39th Streets were sinking into the earth, and their facades threatened to collapse. According to an account in The New York Times, inspectors tried to assure residents that the situation posed no real danger, unless, of course, they “should chance to be standing in front of their homes at the time.”

  Property was not the only thing being swallowed. So were people and animals, at an alarming rate. In the fall of 1902, one Charles F. Allaire, Civil War veteran, accidentally rode his bicycle into an open subway tunnel at Amsterdam Avenue and 65th Street, breaking his right leg. Edward Morris drove a whole car in, at Broadway and 43rd Street. And several months later a runaway black gelding paid the ultimate price to the machine age: he galloped into the subway in Harlem, broke his forelegs and was put down with a police officer’s pistol.