Subwayland Read online

  With the centennial of the subway approaching—the first passengers boarded on Oct. 27, 1904—it seemed a good time to begin a close reading of the news leading up to that momentous day. And if events from a century ago show anything clearly, it is that our urban forebears suffered greatly for the sake of the mass transit we have inherited. In fact, if the movie “Gangs of New York” tells how the city was born in the street, stories of the subway’s construction tell how the modern city was really born beneath them, with great, strange and sometimes deadly labor pains.

  They tell about lakes of quicksand in Chinatown and “rotten rock” under Park Avenue. They tell about the unearthing of cedar water pipes and old cannons and ancient skulls, one, according to The Times, with “two full rows of teeth that looked as though they never knew an ache.” They tell about a procession of lawsuits and accidents and angry strikes so great they would doom most major projects today.

  But the stories also tell of great sacrifice. How, for example, in an era before dump trucks and bulldozers, much of the muscle work was done by pack mules lowered into tunnels in 1900 when digging began and not brought out again until it was finished—many of them going blind in the interim. An article in the winter of 1903 described one such valiant mule, sometimes called Jim by the workers.

  “For the last year,” the article said, “Jim has never opened his eyes, not even when a blast of dynamite was exploded in his vicinity. And although he must be as blind as a bat to all intents, his drivers say he never makes a misstep.”

  Some of the tunnel workers did not fare so well: one hallucinated a fire-breathing dog; another quit because he thought he saw a tiger in the tunnels. The articles tell of some very bad luck, too, personified mostly in Maj. Ira A. Shaler, who earned the nickname the “hoodoo contractor” after a dynamite accident and later a tunnel collapse on his watch in 1902 killed five people, wrecked the Murray Hill Hotel and began to sink several art-filled Park Avenue mansions.

  That same year, during a tunnel inspection with the chief subway engineer, the major stepped a few inches in the wrong direction and was crushed by a falling boulder.

  Most of the misfortunes of subway building were much more mundane. For example, workers had to wade through sewers and contend with man-size icicles dangling from boulders. They had to untangle such a mess of iron and clay beneath 23rd Street that one engineer surmised that more money had been spent on utility pipes there “than under any other thoroughfare in New York, or in the United States for that matter.”

  Of course, none of the stories go so far as to suggest that New Yorkers, being New Yorkers even then, took ruined streets and gas leaks and collapses and noise and fires and rat infestations with anything nearly approaching good grace.

  It was a city that, while part Dodge City—murderous gangs still roamed Kips Bay, commandeering businesses and attacking police officers—was trying very hard to calm down and clean up.

  The offices of The Times were flooded with angry subway complaints for years, mounting as the work dragged on. One 1902 article, summarizing, said the public was finally “beginning to ask if, in their case, patience does not cease to be a virtue.”

  In March of 1903, a gang of ax-bearing men under the command of a police captain destroyed part of a noisy stone-crushing machine near Bryant Park. One night, guests at the Waldorf-Astoria decided they had had enough, too. Awakened by “such a clatter and racket that it was impossible to sleep or have any peace of mind,” they complained angrily to the manager, who complained angrily to the Board of Health, which decided to order the suspension of the work.

  Somehow, the subway was finished anyway. But even its workers stopped trying to bet on when. “Anyone who tries to say exactly when this work will be finished,” one mining foreman said, “is a blamed fool. There’s no telling.”

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 25, 2003

  BAG OF RATS

  There are many different ways to categorize the subway’s 468 stations: the oldest, the busiest, the deepest, the darkest, the hottest, the most fragrant.

  The other day a group of extraordinarily knowledgeable subway buffs were debating a more subjective and much less desirable distinction: the ugliest.

  High on their list was the Wilson Avenue station on the L line, which offers a lovely view of a cemetery through razor wire. Also in contention were 205th Street in the Bronx, where much of the concrete looks like old goat cheese, and the Bowery station, a fittingly corroded shrine to dereliction.

  But eventually they came to settle on the Chambers Street station beneath the Municipal Building as the clear winner in their 2003 subway-station ugly contest. Among the online comments from the judges was that the station was “pretty nasty!!!”Another, exhibiting more emotion than attention to grammar, wrote: “OH GOD, it disgusting and it fulls of YUCKS.”

  A third wrote that there was a good reason the station was used as a setting for the 1984 horror film “C.H.U.D.” about a collection of man-eating monsters who lived beneath New York. (In the movie, the letters seemed to stand for “cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers”; Chambers Street was not, unfortunately, featured in the 1989 sequel, “C.H.U.D. II: Bud the Chud.”)

  The buffs who awarded the Chambers Street station its dubious crown are in a good position to know. Congregating virtually around nycsubway.org, a Web site, they have photographed and documented the subway over the last few years with more zeal than scientists studying endangered species. They can talk with equal authority about everything from motormen’s radio codes to the Malbone Street wreck of 1918 (97 killed in Brooklyn). Their site even offers a translation of a French guide to subway signals, the rare and highly revered “Les signaux du New York City Subway.”

  But this column still wanted to see for itself whether the station deserved the distinction, and so a recent morning was spent in critical appraisal. The first realization that strikes the visitor upon entering the Chambers Street station is how comfortably roomy it is. The second realization is why: It is almost as big as an airplane hangar and, for most of the day, almost completely deserted. One subway buff, Peter Farrell, compares it aptly to “a bombed-out European cathedral” after World War II.

  When it was being built before World War I, Chambers Street was envisioned as a City Hall terminal, a kind of downtown Grand Central at a time when the business and population center of the city was still closer to the southern end of the island. Three years after it opened, its four wide platforms were so overcrowded that one newspaper article described them as “more dangerous during the rush hours than at the Grand Central or the Fourteenth Street Stations.”

  But by the mid-1920’s, the subway itself was pushing the city’s population north and leaving Chambers Street far behind. In fact, the station’s ridership had dropped off so steeply that half of it was closed by the 1930’s.

  Walking around the station now, it seems as if half of the station has not been cleaned or repaired since the 1930’s, either. Platforms are piled deep with the detritus of the years—an old push broom, a broken umbrella, a toaster and several foothills of soda bottles, all of which could be precisely dated according to the depth of the dark-brown steel dust coating them. In one part of the platform, an original Heins and LaFarge terra cotta plaque of the Brooklyn Bridge seems to have been crowbarred off the wall. In another, the yellowish-white water damage is so extensive it appears that a pack of C.H.U.D.’s has tried to eat its way to daylight.

  One regular user of the station, George Moore, an accountant, pointed with disgust to a place where he said he had seen a pile of feces on the platform the day before. He seemed almost dejected that the evidence was missing. “Well, I guess somebody cleaned it up,” he said.

  But another rider, Jacqueline Chapman, said she had never seen a cleaner at work in the station. “Just the rats picking up stuff,” she said, smiling sadly.

  This quickly turned out to be no exaggeration—and, in the end, the most convincing argument that Chambers Street is
without a doubt the ugliest station.

  At the south end of the uptown platform a field of rotting debris stretched for several feet, studded with several full plastic trash bags. As a reporter and photographer watched, one of the black trash bags began to undulate wildly and, over the course of several minutes, as many as a half-dozen rats scurried away from a hole in the top, disappearing into the tunnel darkness.

  A bleary-eyed man standing nearby shrugged, and then leaned over the platform to make friendly, squeaky sounds to the rats below. “Just rats,” he said.

  “You raise the fare to $10, you can’t get rid of rats.”

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED MAY 13, 2003

  THE FISH TRAIN

  Officially, of course, it will always be the B train.

  But just take it on any given Sunday evening, along about half of its southerly course, and you might agree that it would not be much of an exaggeration to give this subway line a subtitle: the Fish Train.

  Ramon Vasquez, a hotel maintenance worker, was aboard the train one Sunday. “Whoa, man,” he said, making a face. “It smells like fish in here.”

  Mr. Vasquez was on his way home to Brooklyn when a bracing aroma boarded the B train at the Grand Street station in Chinatown. It got on along with about 20 Chinese-American Brooklynites, each carrying two armfuls of diaphanous, bright orange plastic bags bulging with all manner of food—sweet-potato leaves, flowering chives, slender purple eggplant, brown litchi—but, first and foremost, with fish.

  Jin Hua Chung, a 60-year-old steam-press operator, was among the fish buyers. He moved to Bensonhurst from Chinatown five years ago, but he still buys his fish only on Mott Street. “Why?” he said. “Because I like fresh, that’s why, and only Chinatown gives me fresh.” As he spoke, a good-size tilapia, which had been yanked live from a fish market tank only a couple of minutes before, poked its head from one of one of his orange plastic bags. (He and his wife share kitchen duties, he says but adds, “I am the better cook.”)

  The Sunday subway fish migration has been growing for a long time now, as Chinese immigrants have fanned out in greater numbers from Manhattan to Brooklyn neighborhoods and yet seem to return en masse to Manhattan on weekends to do all their shopping for the week’s meals.

  The migration can be seen to some degree on a number of trains that serve other Chinatowns—the N and R to Brooklyn; the 6 train from Canal Street to Grand Central, where the fish make their transfer to the 7 and back to Flushing. But the phenomenon is at its most concentrated, and pungent, aboard the B train, which provides the fastest way to get from Chinatown to Sunset Park, the largest Chinese-American enclave in Brooklyn.

  On a nice, late-spring Sunday, it can seem as if thousands of pounds of fish are making their way to Brooklyn along the B, bag by plastic bag, tucked beneath the feet of thousands of riders, bound for thousands of steamers and soup pots.

  Among the exporters on Sunday was a 35-year-old man named Wu,waiting by the turnstiles for his wife, who does all the fish shopping for their family. (He is in charge of vegetables.) There was Ying Hsu, a law student, and her boyfriend, Dan Goldschmidt, a lawyer, who had found what they needed and were bound for Brooklyn. “I just got salmon,” reported Ms. Hsu, almost sheepishly. “A very generic American fish.”

  There was Lisa Mui, an unemployed bartender from Sheepshead Bay who had accompanied her mother on a grocery run. “I love the scene,” said Ms. Mui, who had elaborate fingernails and a pierced tongue. “I do love the scene. But to be honest, it’s really all about the food.” (Later, asked whether the chicken they bought in Chinatown tasted better than supermarket chicken, she rolled her eyes and glanced at her mother, and said, “As long as it doesn’t talk to me when I eat it, it’s fine by me.”)

  The contest for most popular whole fish that Sunday seemed to be a dead heat between striped bass and tilapia, a type of African lake fish that is now widely farmed around the world and has become a staple in many Chinese homes. (Tilapia is said to have been the fish that Jesus multiplied along with the loaves to feed the multitudes.)

  The contest for most popular shade of plastic shopping bag was not even close: deep jack-o’-lantern orange, which has become a kind of calling card of Chinatown groceries and fishmongers. Bright red ran a distant second and pink third.

  Why orange? “Orange is a lucky color,” said Kenny Tran, a manager at the Tan My My Market, on the corner of Chrystie Street and Grand, close enough to the subway entrance to hit with a scallop. “Black looks horrible,” he said. “And white? You know why people don’t use white? Because white is always for the dead.”

  While Sunday’s fish migration seemed festive enough—one man was seen lugging home a case of Budweiser along with his catch—there was a lot of noticeable mourning going on, too, because by the end of the summer, the Fish Train will be no more, at least for a while.

  Repairs to the Manhattan Bridge will mean that the B will not run to Grand Street, and the station will be nearly shut down for more than two years. The fish will still make their way to Brooklyn, of course, but probably in smaller schools, on different trains. It might even be difficult to smell which ones.

  Mr. Chung, for one, is not happy. “They say this is a developed country?” he said. “If they knew this bridge was going to have so many problems, why couldn’t they have built another one?”

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JUNE 19, 2001

  4

  CUSTOMS, COURTING RITUALS, CEREMONIES, AND HIGH CULTURE

  Life in the subway: People have been born there. People have died there. Sometimes, people fall in love there.

  READING BETWEEN THE RAILS

  There are those who spend their days and nights on the subway because it is more pleasant and less dangerous than where they live, others because it is where they live. And there are also those who ride it because it comes with a captive audience, making it a highly effective place to sing songs, sell batteries and save souls.

  But New Yorkers also use the subway for another purpose that goes woefully underappreciated: as a reading room. It is certainly nothing new. It has been going on since long before Arthur Miller eased his commute by reading “The Brothers Karamazov”—that “great book of wonder” as he called it—and decided that he was born to be a writer.

  But there is some evidence, all of it thoroughly anecdotal, that the subway’s use as rolling urban library has expanded over the last several years, in direct proportion to the health of the economy. The theory goes something like this: The good economy makes people happy, but it also makes them work longer hours. Which means they spend their hard-earned money enjoying themselves later into the evening. Which means they have much less time to read books anywhere else except in the only place where their cell phones don’t work and no one is likely to know them or talk to them.

  Many subway riders, like David Gassawy, a 29-year-old art teacher, see their commute as the best uninterrupted reading time remaining in their lives, one not to be squandered on newspapers or magazines.

  Spending a long morning watching people read on the subway, one can learn a few general principles about the practice. Mr. Gassawy expounded the first one yesterday: fiction is superior subway reading. “Nonfiction is more work—it’s harder to do it on the subway,” he said. “Maybe it’s something about following a narrative in fiction.” (Mr. Gassawy was on a southbound A train, reading something called “The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts,” by Louis De Bernieres, a novel in which one character builds a Disneyland in the Andes called Incarama.)

  Another general guideline is that people tend to have their subway books and then they have the books they are reading elsewhere. Rarely do the two libraries mingle.

  Michelle Mills, a 25-year-old design student, well into Book Two of “The Lord of the Rings,” by J. R. R. Tolkien, said, “If I’m really, really into a book then I might keep reading it at home to finish it.” But mostly, she puts away her subway book as she steps out of the train doors and yearns for a longer commute
, something other reading riders admitted to yesterday. “If your ride is too short,” Ms. Mills explained, “then you keep losing the story every day.”

  There is, finally, a widespread phenomenon that might be classified as subway book bashfulness. It happens when people who usually read Kierkegaard at home read King (as in Stephen) on the subway, and become so self-conscious that they fold the title page back or hold the front of the book firmly down in their laps. It also happens in reverse, when readers like Mr. Gassawy get the urge to read something as chewy and highbrow as “The Society of the Spectacle,” by the French theorist Guy Debord. “I covered it up with a paper jacket,” he admitted. “I had to. I just felt too pretentious holding that up in the subway.”

  Of course, some readers are much too into their prose to worry about etiquette. Brad Audett, working on his master’s degree at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, was concentrating yesterday on “Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us,” by Robert D. Hare. Some fellow riders were staring.

  “I read a lot of books about serial killers,” he said. “It’s what I’m studying at school.”

  “I don’t really notice, but I guess it does freak some people out.”

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 7, 2000

  LEG-SPREADERS

  Gillian Costello is a lawyer. Proof is important to her. So yesterday, to show a reporter something on the subway, she conducted a simple empirical demonstration.

  Ms. Costello had absolutely no doubt about the outcome of her experiment, because she tests this particular hypothesis twice every workday. As do most women in New York, whenever they manage to get a seat on a crowded train. The hypothesis: Men take up a lot more room on the subway than women. They stretch out. They lean. They do the Ward Cleaver ankle-on-knee leg cross. But mostly, and most damnably, they tend to sit with their legs splayed out like catchers behind home plate.