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  Early this year in Paris, where the subway is one hundred years old and suffering from strikes as well as delays and other signs of age, the powers came up with a typically French fix: let them have massages. And—bien sûr!—food. The company that operates the city’s Metro put up posters at four stations that said nice, soothing things like “Let’s be Zen.” And then, as rush-hour crowds pushed by, they offered riders free 10-minute massages—choose from eight different styles—plus green tea and seaweed crackers to send them on their way.

  Down the road, Stockholm’s version was not quite as fancy but much funnier. The company that runs the city’s subway, Connex Tunnelbanan, hired “laughing instructors” last month to go into the subways and help riders see the funny side of being overcrowded. “They join the people on the tube and explain to them why laughter is such a good thing,” said a company spokeswoman, who seemed to find nothing particularly humorous about the idea.

  This column set out yesterday afternoon to figure out what kinds of cheap sweeteners New York subway riders would like to see while they wait for the Second Avenue subway to be built. (They have been waiting since about 1920, when it was first proposed.)

  Grand Central Terminal was chosen for the survey because it is arguably the most crowded station on the most crowded line in the city, the Lexington. And, as one might expect, people there thought that some free stuff was long overdue.

  “I want the back rubs, and I want the clowns,” said Noah Johnson, a construction foreman, sweating as he waited for a train. “Right now, I have a little time, and I would love to go get a back massage.”

  Like the most thoughtful of those interviewed, Mr. Johnson, 50, was not wasting his wishes to this would-be genie. Snacks were no good, he said, because they would attract homeless people and then “you couldn’t eat because of the body odor.”

  Others were not quite so practical. There were requests for free hot dogs, to be dispensed by workers on the platforms. For gift bags—with bottles of spring water, maybe, and free magazines and little samples of hand lotion. For battery-powered face fans and booze and televisions on the platforms showing all wrestling, all the time.

  “A sweet cookie ain’t bad,” said Ted Williams, preparing to play some Delta blues on his guitar. “A cookie that says M.T.A. on it. People would like that.” He also mentioned tickets to the Maury Povich show, but then remembered they were free anyway.

  Esaú Gutierrez, a cook sitting nearby, figured why stop there. “Entradas para los juegos,” he said, meaning tickets to the games, meaning, specifically, Yankees games. He smiled at the thought.

  Gene Russianoff, the staff lawyer for the Straphangers Campaign, had a few ideas that he thought would be even more fun for everyone—except maybe for one guy. He proposed a weekly outdoor gaming event called “Dunk a Transit President,” in which “the president of the Transit Authority would go to the Coney Island/Stillwell Avenue subway station. Riders could blow off steam from their long, slow, crowded trip to the ocean by throwing tokens at an M.T.A. ‘Going Your Way’ logo; bull’s-eyes would result in dunking the president in an aquarium of refreshing New York seawater.”

  Al O’Leary, a spokesman for the Transit Authority, did not comment on the merits of this idea. But he did point out that the agency sponsored the Music Under New York program to bring nice, sometimes soothing music into the subway. And it has placed all sorts of nice, beautiful artworks in newly renovated stations. And it posts nice, encouraging poems in the trains, like this one by Ogden Nash:

  Let each man haste to indulge his taste,

  Be it beer, champagne or cider;

  My private joy, both man and boy,

  Is being a railroad rider.

  “I can’t say there’s been any proactive effort to increase the number of yucks on hot, crowded subway stations,” Mr. O’Leary said. “But New Yorkers are capable of finding the humor in a lot of things. For example, those 20-year-old guys who are panhandling and say they were in Vietnam. I think New Yorkers find those guys funny.”

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JULY 17, 2001

  FUNERAL AT SEA

  With a splash instead of a screech, Redbird subway car No. 7835 made its last stop today.

  It was born around 1959 in Berwick, Pa. It spent more than 40 years under and above the streets of New York, carrying far more than a million passengers within its bloodred-painted steel walls. And at 1:08 p.m., it toppled ingloriously over the edge of a rusty barge off the coast of Delaware, traveling 80 feet to its final resting place, where its new passengers, all nonpaying, will be blue mussels and black sea bass.

  The cause of death, according to New York City Transit, was old age and the high cost of maintenance.

  “Goodbye, Dr. Zizmor, forever,” said David Ross, the transit official who had the slightly crazy idea last year that maybe the agency could junk its oldest subway cars more cheaply by dumping them in the ocean to serve as artificial reefs.

  It was not the first scheme that had been proposed for scrapping 1,300 rusting, rattling cars, known as Redbirds, which are being retired over the next two years as a sleek new generation of trains begins to replace them. Because the old cars contain a layer of asbestos within their walls for sound and heat insulation, tearing them apart for junk metal would have involved a costly process of asbestos removal.

  So transit officials first explored the idea of donating the cars to a somewhat needier subway system. They literally called around the world, talking to Romania, Hungary, China, Brazil, India, Pakistan and Turkey, but figured out that it was far from simple, legally and diplomatically, to give away an 80,000-pound, asbestos-spiked subway car.

  Even after the reef idea was broached, finding a nice stretch of ocean floor for the cars was not easy. In April, New Jersey officials rejected the idea for their waters, citing uncertainty about how quickly the cars would deteriorate under the water and possibly allow the asbestos to contaminate sea life.

  But in June, the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control accepted the idea, and agreed to take four hundred cars, after assurances from the United States Environmental Protection Agency that interments at sea were safe.

  Today, 27 of the weathered cars were lined up like condemned inmates along the deck of a marine salvage barge that heaved to about 19 miles east of Cape Henlopen, Del. The cars, which had been loaded onto the barge in a train yard in Manhattan Thursday, had been stripped of their wheels, motors, seats and the window glass—even the infamous Dr. Zizmor acne ads.

  But most of the metal straps upon which generations of straphangers hung remained on board. The reef, Delaware officials explained, needed as many hard surfaces as possible to create “an enriched invertebrate community” where once a tense, overcrowded New Yorker community had thrived.

  As funerals go, the subway sea burial was less than solemn. Reef advocates and state legislators watched from a nearby ferry, sipping champagne and chewing on roast beef sandwiches, as the cars plunked one by one into the water, where they would soon be keeping silent company with two sunken tugboats and a barge.

  Before the first car took its dive, officials from New York and Delaware held a simple ceremony aboard the ferry to commemorate the occasion. The Rev. Capt. Thomas J. Protack of the Delaware Division of Fish and Wildlife Enforcement asked God’s blessing on the subway cars and the new reef they would form. “May it be a place where your creatures can dwell in peace and safety,” he prayed.

  A former New Yorker, Blackie Nygood, led about one hundred people onboard the ferry in a rousing rendition of “The Sidewalks of New York.” Then, right before a yellow bulldozer shoved the first Redbird off into the drink, Mrs. Nygood cast three subway tokens upon the water—one for the IRT subway line, one for the BMT and the last for the IND.

  At least one transit official considered all of this a lucky omen and called a friend on his cell phone to have him buy a lottery ticket bearing the number of the first car to go overboard. “Dollar straight, dollar box
,” he said into the phone.

  Bill Baker, owner of Bill’s Sport Shop in Lewes, Del., was not just hoping to get lucky. He knew he would: he sells tackle. More reefs mean more fish. More fish mean more fishermen. More fishermen mean more business.

  Bill Weiss, who works at the shop, said, “You know how many more sinkers we’re going to sell?”

  Mr. Baker thought about it. “This is the biggest thing that’s happened in Delaware in a hundred years.”

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AUGUST 22, 2001

  SONG OF THE SUBWAY

  Pretty much since trains started rolling, people have been fascinated with the sounds they make. Songs have been inspired by the rhythm of the engine (“Orange Blossom Special”), the dirge of the whistle (“I Heard That Lonesome Whistle”), even the thunder of the crash (“Wreck of the Old ’97”).

  As lyrical as they are considered to be, however, trains themselves are not known for making music.

  So a few months back, when riders on the No. 2 line began to hear an ethereal song, or at least the opening strain to one, emanating from the newest generation of silvery subway trains, they almost distrusted themselves.

  Roy Futterman, a clinical psychologist who commutes from the Upper West Side to the Bronx, was reminded of a psychotic symptom called ideas of reference, in which, for example, the sufferer watches an episode of “Happy Days,” and believes that the Fonz is delivering a message directly to him.

  “I’m riding the subway, and I keep hearing this song,” Dr. Futterman said. “And I think: Am I having an idea of reference? Am I getting the secret message?”

  If he was, he was not the only one. Lots of people, especially when they were standing around the middle of the new subway trains, swore they could hear three distinct, electric-sounding high notes coming from somewhere on the trains after their doors were closed and the trains began to pull away.

  It was definitely not the same, boring whirr of the older trains, which starts low and slowly builds to a resounding high note, like a bad Jennifer Holliday impersonator. It was not the ding-dong of the doors, which is already burned deeply into every brain cell of the regular subway rider. This sounded more futuristic, like something from a Philip Glass opera, the last note trailing off magisterially.

  Having nothing more interesting to do than dread work or angle for a seat or pretend to read, riders on the line have begun to pass their time by trying to figure out what song it is and, more importantly, why it is being played.

  There are the theremin partisans, who swear that the sound is the eerie electronic one you hear in countless science-fiction movies, usually played as the alien descends from the mother ship. Others say it sounds like the three-note NBC theme, but most agree that the notes are not quite that upbeat.

  Lately, a strong consensus seems to be building around the notes being the first three from “Somewhere” in “West Side Story”—the ones that go with the words “There’s a place.” This does make some strange sense: the No. 2 runs through the mythical turf of the Sharks and Jets. (The only argument against the theory are the words that come later in the verse, which have no place in the subway: “Peace and quiet and open air.”)

  Figuring out why New York City subway trains seem to be playing Leonard Bernstein proves a much more difficult task. Juan Harvey, a messenger waiting yesterday at the 66th Street station, said he has heard the song and believes it is “some kind of a plot by the Japanese to brainwash us all.”

  This would be an intriguing line of inquiry, except that the new No. 2 trains are actually manufactured by a Canadian company called Bombardier. Informed of this, Mr. Harvey said that he did not think the Canadians would want to brainwash us.

  A call was placed to the engineers at Bombardier in Plattsburgh, N.Y., where the trains are assembled. All questions about musical trains were referred to someone named Andre, who could not take the call and did not return it yesterday.

  So a reporter went to a meeting at the headquarters of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority on Madison Avenue, hoping to find answers there. Joseph Hofmann, the senior vice president for subways, professed never to have heard the song but said that if it were up to him, it would certainly not be anything from “West Side Story.” He was once an usher at a production of the musical and listened to all its songs at least two hundred times.

  “Don’t talk to me about ‘West Side Story,’” he said.

  The question was put next to George Feinstein, the transit agency’s project manager for the new trains, who said the explanation most likely was a mundane one, having to do with the advanced engines of the new trains, which use alternating instead of direct current, as older trains do. The direct current from the third rail is converted aboard the train to alternating current, and in the process, perhaps, beautiful music is made.

  “I don’t think anybody planned it that way,” said Mr. Feinstein, shattering the illusions of Dr. Futterman, who had hoped there was a mad transit genius out there somewhere who said to himself, “Hmmm. I’ve got to let the air out of this gadget one way or another. Why don’t I build it so that when it does, it plays a nice little song?”

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JANUARY 29, 2002

  THE G-TRAIN SPRINT

  New York has bestowed names on many things over the years. There is the New York minute and the Bronx cheer, the Manhattan cocktail and the Waldorf salad. Even Mount Rushmore is named after a New Yorker, Charles E. Rushmore, a lawyer who owned mining property in the area.

  There is now a chance that a new fitness routine will be named for something that has been happening spontaneously at subway stations in Brooklyn and Queens over the last four months. Locally, it has become known as the G-train sprint.

  The basic workout goes like this: Warm up by walking through a turnstile carrying your bag and a cup of hot deli coffee. When you hear a beeping sound that means a train is approaching, start to jog toward the stairway.

  Upon reaching the middle of the stairs and seeing that the train is much shorter than you thought it would be, therefore farther away, bound down the stairs two at a time, exercising your vocal chords by making panic-like sounds. Once on the platform, break into a full sprint, dodging or ramming, if necessary, the people who are getting off the train and walking in the opposite direction.

  This routine is intended to work most major muscle groups, develop cardiovascular strength and improve coordination. After enough practice, you should be able to jump into the end car of the shortened train just as the doors close on your bag, splashing only a little coffee on your shirt. Do not be discouraged if you cannot perform the exercise correctly on the first few tries.

  Joan Dougherty, a paralegal, was not able to do it yesterday morning at the Greenpoint Avenue station, and she has been training there for months. She complained grievously of a violation of the rules. “The guy saw me!” she said of the conductor, as his train pulled out and he watched with a bored expression as her sprint faded to a jog.

  Peter Jou, a computer programmer, decided not to try at all. From the top of the stairs, he saw the train, paused and then walked calmly and evenly down as it pulled away. “I’m always afraid I’m going to fall down the stairs,” he explained.

  The situation that has given rise to the G-train sprint is part of a series of Solomonic bargains, the kind that New York City Transit must make when it tries to change anything within the rigid logic of the subway.

  In order to reduce crushing crowding in Queens, it added the V train along Queens Boulevard, where the E, F, R and G already ran. But that meant too many trains for too few tracks, so one train had to go, and it ended up being the G, which had its route cut almost in half. Of course, an uproar ensued among its riders. And so a concession was made: the train would continue to run its full route weekends and nights, and it would also run more frequently, particularly during busy times.

  Except there was another problem. To run more frequently, the G needed more trains, but there were not enough on hand. So th
e solution was to cut the trains from six cars to four, sticking all the leftover cars together to make extra trains. While on paper this means more trains, it seems to riders that it means only more of them, packed into smaller trains.

  And, more importantly for explaining the G-train sprint, it means that on a platform designed to be filled by an eight-car, 600-foot train, the ones that show up now are only 300 feet long. Back in December, when the change was first made, paper signs were posted on platform columns to let riders know where these truncated trains would stop. But the signs are gone now and for people unfamiliar with the line, the wind sprints have begun.

  “I was at Bergen Street one day, and it looked like the burning of Atlanta in ‘Gone With the Wind,’” said Gene Russianoff, a lawyer for the Straphangers Campaign who lives along the G line in Brooklyn. “There were all these people flooding down the platform in waves.”

  Patti Choi, a member of the Noble Street Block Association in Greenpoint, has been riding the G train so long she remembers when it was called something else. She looked imploringly at a conductor yesterday as a few of the weaker runners barely managed to make his train at the Greenpoint Avenue station. The conductor shrugged as the train pulled away. “I waited for them, right?” he said. “You saw me waiting.”

  Eddy Rodriguez and John Marshall barely made it. Before the train came, they had been chewing the fat on a bench that was a relic of a more genteel past: The trains don’t stop there anymore.

  “You write down this: ‘We want our train back,’” said Mr. Rodriguez, wearing a jacket with the word “Bulldog” written in capital letters on the back, running down the platform with a cup of coffee and a bad limp. “Did you write that down?”

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED APRIL 9, 2002

  RIDING FOR TWO

  It is a familiar refrain that September 11 showed not only the world but even New Yorkers themselves how nice they could really be. They gave time and money and food. They gave Caribbean cruises to firefighters. They gave rides to perfect strangers trying to get home that horrible day.