Subwayland Read online

  “I’d tell my friends, ‘Someday I’m going to call subway guy,’” Ms. Andersen said. “And they’d say, ‘Call him! Call subway guy!’”

  So she did.

  And thus on Saturday evening, slightly behind schedule—somehow appropriate given the place they met—subway guy and cute girl stood at the elegant altar of the Marble Collegiate Church on Fifth Avenue and 29th Street, he in white tie and she in a lovely white dress.

  At “for better or worse,” Ms. Andersen became so overcome with emotion that she began to cry, and Mr. McFeely again came to her aid, wiping a tear from her right cheek. At 5:43 p.m. they became husband and wife, kissing so ardently that the two hundred guests broke into applause.

  The new couple said they had absolutely no desire to take the subway to their reception, but they did want to take a few pictures down in the place where it all began. So they hopped into a cab and shot over to the 23rd Street station.

  As they walked down the platform, the train of Mrs. McFeely’s dress sweeping elegantly behind her, a homeless man looked on with perplexed awe, knowing that he was witnessing a momentous occasion but having trouble figuring out just what kind.

  Finally, a smile crept across his face. “Happy birthday!” he exclaimed. “Happy birthday!”

  Asking a passerby for a dollar, he confided, “I just love birthdays.”

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JANUARY 28, 2003

  TOKEN SUCKERS

  In five days, when the last New York City subway token slides through the slot of the last booth to sell them, few people will notice and fewer will care. There will be no official ceremony to mark the passing. If there is music in the background, it will not be taps; it will be the bleating love song that turnstiles sing to valid MetroCards.

  But off in a corner, in the shadows where things begin to smell, at least a few observers will notice and care quite a lot. They belong to a sad and desperate breed of criminal that has been in decline for a long time, one that will soon become as irrelevant to major lawbreaking as moonshiners and horse thieves.

  Officially, the crime is classified as theft of Transit Authority property. But among transit police officers it is more accurately and less delicately known as token sucking. Unfortunately for everyone involved, it is exactly what it sounds like.

  The criminal carefully jams the token slot with a matchbook or a gum wrapper and waits for a would-be rider to plunk a token down. The token plunker bangs against the locked turnstile and walks away in frustration. Then from the shadows, the token sucker appears like a vampire, quickly sealing his lips over the token slot, inhaling powerfully and producing his prize: a $1.50 token, hard-earned and obviously very badly needed.

  Even among officers who had seen it all, it was widely considered the most disgusting nonviolent crime ever to visit the subway.

  “It gave you the willies,” said Brendan J. McGarry, a veteran transit police officer. “We’ve had cases every so often, these guys would end up choking and swallowing the tokens. Then what do you do? You’ve got to wait for the evidence to come out.”

  In truth, most token suckers usually had enough evidence already in their pockets to warrant locking them up—some of the most dedicated were able to extract more than $50 worth of tokens a day. And deterrence, when dealing with someone willing to clamp his mouth to one of the most public surfaces in all of New York City, was next to impossible.

  “These guys were on their last legs,” Officer McGarry said. “If they were going to jail, it was just an inconvenience for them.” (In an interview with a reporter for The Los Angeles Times in the early 1990’s, one token sucker acknowledged the depths of his desperation. “Hard times makes you do it,” he explained, adding, “Anyways, I’ve kissed women that’s worse.”)

  Eddie Cassar, a retired transit officer, recalled making his first token-sucker arrests in the late 1970’s, and by the time he retired in 1982, there was already a dedicated corps of inhalers, mostly teenagers and homeless men, working the station at 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue. By 1989, with the rise of the crack trade, token sucking reached almost unbelievable proportions.

  During a typical summer week, repair crews were sent on 1,779 calls to fix turnstiles in a system that had 2,897 turnstiles in all. More than 60 percent of the calls involved paper stuffed into the token slots. (A related subway crime involved people who disabled the turnstiles and charged riders cut-rate fees to enter through the metal gates, to which they had stolen keys. These criminals, somewhat higher on the social ladder than token suckers, were known as trolls.)

  Occasionally, methods other than incarceration were employed to dissuade the suckers. Token booth clerks were known to sprinkle chili powder into the token slots that were most often jammed. Some officers resorted to spraying a small amount of Mace around the regular slots and keeping an eye out for the usual suspects. The ones with the bright red lips were arrested.

  By the time the MetroCard was introduced in the mid-1990’s, token suckers could already sense the beginning of the end. But Officer McGarry said that even the introduction of advanced new turnstiles did little more than thin their ranks. By the late 1990’s, he said, he was on a first-name basis with many of the sad token-sucking holdouts, who would probably never adapt to MetroCard crimes.

  “It was almost like having some kind of rapport with these guys,” he said. There was one tall, thin homeless man, he said, who was even pleasant about the whole process. “He’d say, ‘Hi, Mac,’ when I caught him. And I’d say ‘Hi’ back, and he’d just walk up to me like a poodle, and I’d tell him to turn around and put his arms behind his back.”

  Lately, Officer McGarry said, he spots only three old-time token suckers around the Midtown area and only one who is still known to be at it occasionally. But he can’t even remember the last time he locked the man up. In the end, he said, technology may have killed the token sucker. But the crime did a pretty good job all by itself.

  “These guys had a lot of various diseases,” he said. “You name it, they had it. You don’t last too long in that line of work.”

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED APRIL 8, 2003

  SO NEAR

  Before Yankee Stadium underwent an extensive renovation in the mid-1970’s, a big baseball fan with small resources could take the No. 4 train to 161st Street, walk out to one end of the elevated platform and, with no ticket purchased other than a token, gaze down onto a slice of the emerald green field where legends were at play.

  But then, in a serious setback for freeloading, the outfield wall was raised. Subway platform spectators are now allowed nothing more than a tantalizing view of the upper deck in the far distance, the tiptop of the stadium flagpole with its yardarm shaped like a baseball bat, and the silvery lights reflecting back out of a stadium they cannot see into.

  And so the subway crowd that once gathered on the platform for games has nearly disappeared. But with the city in the throes of the first Subway Series since 1956, there are once again at least a handful of ticketless fans who believe that it is not enough to watch the game on television or listen to it on the radio.

  They want to be there, to hear “The Star-Spangled Banner” echoing into the night, to hear the names of the batters somberly intoned by Bob Sheppard, the Yankees’ announcer, and to try to divine from the roars and silences of the crowd what is going on behind that impervious beige wall that is about as far away as a throw to first base.

  “I always like to stand here for a while, just to get the feel of the game,” said Jose Esquilin, 57, a retired hospital maintenance worker. Mr. Esquilin had walked about 20 minutes from his apartment to the elevated station last night, arriving just in time to hear the Ocean Township and Point Pleasant Boro high school bands run through a blaring rendition of “Louie, Louie” one last time before marching into the stadium.

  “Maybe some people feel bad, standing here so close and not getting to see anything,” Mr. Esquilin said. “But it’s the scene, you know. I mean, look around you. Have you ever se
en anything like this? I’m probably going to go on down to Manhattan later to watch the rest of the game with a friend of mine. But you’ve got to come by here for a little while, right? It’s the patriotic thing to do.”

  As Game 2 got under way last night, and a biting October wind picked up, only the hardiest of the platform fans remained, and the crowd dwindled slowly with each passing No. 4 train.

  But there were still the left-out spectators who really had no choice but to stay and try to imagine what was going on behind the wall: the police officers who patrolled the platform, the supervisors who kept the trains rolling and the troops of weary transit workers who were already beginning in earnest to clean up after the crowd.

  “The Yankees just scored,” announced Glen Shadrick, a train service supervisor, who had cocked his ear to the crowd noise and divined immediately what it meant. Then, like an experienced platform fan, he listened for what came out of the stadium next as confirmation.

  “There it is,” he said. “You can tell they scored because they wouldn’t play that kind of happy music at Yankee Stadium if the Mets had scored, would they?”

  About 8:30, Martin Terrizzi, another train supervisor, jogged up to the platform and yelled at Mr. Shadrick, “Hey, you see that thing with Piazza? Oh, my God!”

  Mr. Shadrick shot a look out from beneath the brim of his tall black hat. “Now how am I going to have seen what happened with Piazza? How did you see what happened with Piazza?”

  Mr. Terrizzi admitted, “I was downstairs in the office. I saw it on television.”

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED OCTOBER 23, 2000

  THE MILK RUN

  A 35-year-old man was sitting on the E train early yesterday morning, looking at the stock tables from the financial section of USA Today.

  This fact may not seem particularly noteworthy. People in New York read newspapers on subways in the early morning every day.

  But in this case, it was extraordinarily early in the morning: 3:30. And the newspaper was a month old. It had been folded so many times it was crumbling like dead leaves in the man’s hands. The man himself was bundled up in a torn felt coat, with multiple layers of clothing visible beneath the coat. From beneath the coat, two thin legs stuck out, covered in jeans that were once blue but had taken on a dirt-brown sheen.

  The man was sitting in a corner of the train, and above his head was an advertisement for a subway homeless outreach program, which included a picture of a homeless man who looked a lot like him. (“He May Be Without a Home, but He’s Not Without Help,” the ad says, showing a transit worker kneeling to talk to the homeless man.)

  Asked how he had ended up like the man in the picture, the man with the newspaper, creasing it furiously, said, “I don’t want to get into that.”

  In the next car, Vincent McFarland, 43, was more forthcoming about how it had happened to him. “Drugs,” he said, sleepily. What kinds? he was asked. “All kinds,” he said.

  Two cars away, a 52-year-old man who would give only his first name, Michael, said that his reasons for sleeping on the trains were less serious, but more involved. “I do have a mailing address,” he said proudly. “And I vote.” He paused and added, “Let’s just say it’s a roommate problem.”

  His new roommates, the ones spending the night on the train with him yesterday, had few things in common. But one thing they did share was a firm opinion, one they say has been held by homeless men and women for years now:

  If you have to sleep on a subway, the E train is far and away the best place to do it. Or perhaps a more accurate way to phrase it would be that the E is indisputably the least undesirable place to spend the night on a moving subway train in New York City. Some homeless men, with equal measures of affection and sarcasm, call it the milk run.

  “I didn’t pick this train; it picked me,” said one 46-year-old homeless man yesterday morning, sitting next to a tower of possessions lashed together with bungee cords. “I tried a lot of trains,” he said.

  In the last several months, strong anecdotal evidence from throughout the subway has suggested that the homeless population on several train lines is higher this winter than it has been in years. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority insists that it has experienced “no appreciable increase,” but many riders say that they have, and they worry about a return to the days in which subways doubled as flophouses.

  “I hadn’t seen anyone sleeping in the cars literally for years,” said Jim Grossman, a public relations consultant who has been taking the A to work for the past 25 years. “It started getting bad around New Year’s. This morning, when I went to get on the train, one car had five homeless people sleeping on it. I can’t figure out what’s going on.”

  Neither could many early commuters on the E train, as the morning crept toward dawn. In the car where the man named Michael slept, four other men were slumped over near him, riding 32 stops in one direction, 32 stops in the other, without stirring. At one point, 15 sleepers, including 3 women, were arrayed among the 10 cars, driven in by the cold rain. Some of them drove other passengers out with their smell.

  One woman furtively smoked cigarettes and engaged in a running argument with herself, screaming things like, “I’m not retarded! I’m just tired.”

  The other sleepers were silent, mostly, their bags and carts gathered around them like little fortresses. The police usually leave them alone as long as they remain upright, they say, and so they fight desperately against inertia, trying not to slump down onto the invitingly empty car benches.

  Some, like Mr. McFarland, who has been homeless for 11 months, seem to have perfected the technique.

  “I mean, it ain’t a nice place to sleep,” he said. “But you train yourself. I can get a very good night’s sleep.”

  The sleepers say they prefer the E for simple and practical reasons. First, it is one of the few lines in the city that runs completely underground. This means that when it is very cold outside, there are no elevated platforms where the bitter wind can whip into the opening car doors.

  The other reason, several men said, is that the line runs only from Queens to Manhattan, through neighborhoods they consider safe, reducing the danger that they will be robbed or beaten up or bothered.

  In fact, about the only thing that bothers Mr. McFarland on the E is morning commuters. By 6:30, as his car began to fill with purposeful-looking people, he stretched and gathered up his things. It was checkout time.

  “It gets too crowded,” he complained. “And loud.”

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 12, 2002

  THE HANDOFF

  On any given weekday, there are literally hundreds of places in the subway where an amateur performer might draw a decent crowd. But among subway show-business veterans, some stages are considered much better than others.

  The hierarchy goes something like this:

  Any local station, but especially one outside Manhattan, is seen as the equivalent of, say, a Hula Room at a Holiday Inn on the outskirts of Des Moines. These are the sleepy stations where rookie performers cut their teeth and gauge the popularity of their material before striking out into the larger world of mass-transit entertainment.

  Further up the ladder is a place like the L-train platform at Union Square. This stage could be compared to CBGB, a popular yet intimate setting where more experienced artists can develop a cult following and make a nice profit.

  And then there is the big time: Times Square, the Madison Square Garden of the subway circuit.

  The most popular stage there—recently reopened after going dark for several months because of construction—sits on the main level, near the escalators leading to 42nd Street. Physically, it is nothing special: a patch of gum-stained gray floor tile, a bank of fluorescent lights and a tall white column that serves as a proscenium arch. But several hundred thousand potential audience members crowd past every day, so this stage is among the most coveted in the system.

  Which raises a question long pondered by this column: at suc
h popular places, who decides who performs when?

  What happens when the break-dancers, the soul singer, the guy who tangos with mannequins and the mimes who paint themselves silver all show up at once, ready, like Mickey and Judy, to put on a show? Are there backstage fistfights? Is there some kind of roving subway booking agent?

  To find out, most of last Friday was spent in the cheap seats at Times Square, leaning against a column under the Roy Lichtenstein mural.

  On several occasions, it had been observed that an elderly white-haired man usually played classical music on an electronic keyboard at this Times Square stage on Friday mornings and early afternoons. Sure enough, he arrived just after 9 a.m., along with a friend who helped him carry his instrument and amplifier. He explained that his technique for securing the stage was exceedingly straightforward: he simply gets there before anyone else.

  The man, 72, said that his name was Eduardo Alvarado and that he was a retired symphony director from Ecuador. He prefered to be called Professor.

  For two hours, the Professor hunched happily over his keyboard, his body shaped like the letter C, playing lively pieces from Beethoven, Bach and Schubert to sparse crowds.

  When he left to use the bathroom, his assistant, Francisco Yapur, 43, a sometime guitar player, guarded the stage fiercely, fending off an attempted invasion by a group of break-dancers.

  “How long y’all going to be here?” one dancer asked, adding, somewhat menacingly, “We don’t want to disrupt you. We just want to do our thing.” But Mr. Yapur indicated no willingness to yield the Professor’s spot.

  “He is a money machine,” he said of his mentor, Mr. Alvarado, smiling as the break-dancers wandered away.

  Unfortunately, the Professor’s machine was not cranking out very much money that morning. Only five dollars in bills and change sat in the wicker basket in front of his Yamaha keyboard. So when he returned, he decided to jettison Beethoven in favor of a long pop medley that began with the theme from “Dr. Zhivago,” then veered into Simon and Garfunkel and the theme from “Love Story,” and finally ended with a rousing version of “Besame Mucho,” an electronic disco beat chugging in the background.