Subwayland Read online

  At Union Square last Friday, the door to the women’s room was wide open, allowing a fermented aroma to roll out like harbor fog. With urgent need, Aleisha Johnson started to go in but retreated before she cleared the threshold. Her boyfriend, Oston Taylor, described the odor as something “like a morgue where somebody left the dead bodies out of the freezer.”

  At the 14th Street station on the Nos. 1, 2 and 3 lines, the men’s room was behind a metal door that looked as if it had recently withstood a rocket attack. The door was padlocked, with a chain, and appeared not to have been opened since the Coolidge administration. A congenial conductor took out his pass key and unlocked it for a visitor, explaining that the restroom was last open to the public only a week ago.

  But one night, someone decided to stuff newspapers and clothes into all of its facilities. The conductor opened the door and then backed up quickly, along with this reporter. Everything inside looked green.

  “Whoa,” the conductor said. “Lordy.”

  A station cleaner said that the plumbers refused to fix the situation until she mopped it up, but she was not about to mop it up until her bosses gave her “a suit.”

  “You know,” she said. “A hazard suit. With boots and gloves and a mask.”

  Fezlul Khan, the manager of the newsstand nearby, said he was one of the few who still had the courage to enter the restroom, but only because he had no choice. “Lot of people going in there and doing very, very bad things,” he said.

  What things?

  He smiled, weakly. “Oh, my friend, you know.”

  In a city infamous for its lack of amenities, the subway represents undoubtedly the greatest possibility for public relief, with more than 200 restrooms built into the system, most of them in the busiest stations. But cleaning them, policing them and repairing them long ago became such a headache and financial drain for the subway that their location is now a kind of dirty secret, not included on any map or Web site and known primarily by the people who seem to live in them.

  Every once in a while, these people seem to resent that the bathrooms are their residence and try to demolish them.

  “I’m talking sheer vandalism just for the sake of vandalism,” said Brenda Sidberry, an assistant chief station officer for New York City Transit, who added that it was hard to say how many of the 60 restrooms on the open-restroom list were open at any given time and if so, in what condition.

  Fixing just one broken toilet, pipes and all, she said, can cost up to $20,000. And hiring even part-time attendants costs much more, so the idea was dropped years ago.

  Last Friday, camouflage man was doing his part to help out, serving as a stable presence at the 34th Street restroom. At about 11 a.m., he settled into a stall, bags and all, and was still there an hour later.

  Bob Lovett, a dancer from Naples, Fla., dozing on a nearby bench, shrugged and said, “I’m sure he’s just in there installing some toilet paper.”

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JUNE 11, 2002

  LIGHT AT THE TOP OF THE STAIRS

  Nonverbal communication has always been widespread in the subway.

  There are countless varieties using the eyes alone: the eye roll, the leer, the leave-me-alone stare, the suspicious sidelong glance, and the squinting of the eyelids—the universal symbol of trying and failing to understand that purling sound coming from the public address system.

  There is also a clearly enunciated body language. The aggressive elbow bend, which means, “Back up off me.” The kick in the back of the heel, for those who wander obliviously in front of you and cut you off. And of course, the satisfying shoulder check, deployed against egregious door blockers. (The all-purpose use of a certain finger, frequent among New York drivers, is rarely seen in such close quarters as the subway.)

  But in addition to informal communication, those who run the subway have purposely created unwritten markers to try to ease travelers through the transit maze. Probably the most important and recognizable among these is the subway globe, the colored glass lamps perched atop the metal newel posts at most subway entrances. The globes are always the first interaction that riders have with the system, sometimes a block or more before they even enter it. The globes are part of the permanent street furniture of New York City and are supposed to serve as a kind of beacon, announcing that the subway system is intelligible, that people are in charge down there, and that they have, in the comforting words of Tom Bodett, left a light on for you.

  But understanding the meaning of that light, and why it is a different color from the light on the other entrance, even though the entrances seem to be exactly the same, is another matter altogether.

  While New York City Transit has made huge advances in the last few years in the art of speaking more clearly to huge numbers of harried people—polishing its Web site and ungurgling many of its loudspeakers—the globes endure as one of the city’s largely untranslated hieroglyphs.

  “They’re kind of like a vestigial organ, left over from another century,” said Sue London yesterday, looking up at a dusty red one in Times Square.

  Though it might seem as if they have been around that long, the globes have been confusing people only for about 20 years. Before that, most lights were sheathed in milky white globes, and their purpose was illumination, not information.

  But in the early 1980’s, mostly to try to prevent muggings, transit officials started a color-coding system to warn riders away from entrances that were closed at night. The original idea was to follow the three-color stoplight scheme: green meant that a station had a token booth that never closed; yellow meant a part-time token booth (but in some places, with a token, you could still get in through a full-body turnstile); and red meant an entrance with no booth and no way to get in (though you might be able to get out, through one-way full-body turnstiles).

  As the number of words in the above description indicates, however, this system was much, much more complicated than go, slow down, stop.

  So the yellow lights were discontinued a decade ago to simplify things, transit officials said, meaning that the red lights would serve the yellow lights’ purpose, as well as the purpose that the red light used to serve. But then the MetroCard was introduced in 1994, meaning that many entrances that had been exit-only were equipped with full-body card-entrance turnstiles.

  And then, responding to concerns that the colored lights did not give off enough light, transit officials several years ago began installing what they call “half-moons” when station entrances were rebuilt. These are globes that have a colored top half and a milky white bottom.

  Junior Torres, smoking a cigarette yesterday near an entrance to the A line on Eighth Avenue and 15th Street, said confidently that he knew exactly what all the globes meant: green means always open, red means always closed, half-green means open most of the time and half-red means closed most of the time. “That’s what they mean,” Mr. Torres said, though it is not what they mean at all.

  Two transit workers near a 14th Street entrance allowed that they had never known just what the colors meant. And Toribio Nunez, coming out of the entrance, said he had always assumed that they were purely decorative, like lights on a Christmas tree. “I’ve never looked at them, to tell you the truth,” he said.

  Linda Vaccari and Laura Cugini, tourists from Bologna, Italy, said they were pretty sure that the colors showed the colors of the train lines below, though, strangely, this often left them lost.

  “At the beginning,” said Ms. Cugini, laughing, “we are very confused.”

  So are many others, and not just at the beginning.

  “The joke going around when these things were first installed,” said Larry Furlong, an amateur subway historian, “was that green meant go in, red meant don’t.”

  “And yellow meant take a cab.”

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AUGUST 13, 2002

  THE SINGLES CAR

  It would have taken a great deal of poetic license last Friday night to describe the first car of the Manhatt
an-bound F train as a happening place, the place to meet that special someone.

  Just after 7, as the car rumbled out of the 15th Street station in Brooklyn, there were exactly eight people aboard. Among them was a big man in a tropical shirt with a long white beard, looking something like Santa Claus in a Jimmy Buffett suit. Across the aisle was a little boy with his head in his mother’s lap, and a few seats away a man snored, annoying an already annoyed-looking girl in a torn Smiths T-shirt.

  Apparently, these people had not received the official notification, the one sent out by e-mail nearly a month ago now:

  “As of today, Wednesday, August 14,” it read, “the first car of every subway train running in New York City’s five boroughs is hereby declared THE SINGLES CAR: A free zone for unattached New Yorkers to meet the commuter of their dreams. Please ride accordingly, and work that $1.50!”

  True, this declaration was issued with no more authority than you would have if you declared that the first car of your morning train was henceforth your own private hospitality suite.

  True, the declaration was made not by New York City Transit or anyone official but by a group no one had ever heard of, a vaguely utopian-sounding collective with a British spelling, the Organisation for Better Underground Living.

  And true, the only three members of this group—a 31-year-old Manhattan graduate student, Christine Prentice; a 28-year-old Brooklyn architect, Marshall Brown; and a 31-year-old Brooklyn writer and editor, Mark Schwartz—had convened its first and only meeting last month while drinking together in a Park Slope bar.

  But in a world where perception can drive reality as surely as the motorman drives the F train, the declaration—sent to about 250 friends and colleagues of the three—seems to be acquiring a strange kind of legitimacy based solely on the fact that someone thought to declare it.

  Over the last three weeks, the threesome have been interviewed everywhere from CNN to Newsweek. And their oddly romantic idea seems to be picking up speed internationally as well, with reporters from Ottawa and Dutch television tracking them down.

  “It was like, we sent this kind of funny e-mail out to a bunch of our friends,” Mr. Schwartz said. “And then a week later, it’s on Fox. I mean, how strange is that?”

  Without seeking it or even wanting it much, the three friends are getting the kind of attention that some people pay public relations experts vast sums of money to try to get. And all for a simple idea that Ms. Prentice hoped would maybe land her a date and, in the process, remind people not to lose the kind of openness that suffused the city after September 11.

  “It seemed that by Christmas, a lot of that was going away,” she said. “It was really making me sad.”

  The fact that lots of people have heard about the singles car makes her very happy. But what would make her and Mr. Brown and Mr. Schwartz immeasurably more happy is if the idea would actually start filling the front cars of trains with lots and lots of great-looking, friendly men and women who would walk up to them and smile and say the secret password that they suggested for the single straphanger in the know:

  “Excuse me, is this train going downtown?”

  Last Friday, on the F line, this was not happening, exactly.

  Ms. Prentice and Mr. Brown were aboard as anonymous investigators, looking around the front car, hopefully, as the train made its way from the East Village to Park Slope, territory that should have been prime recruiting ground for the Organisation for Better Underground Living.

  Mr. Brown spotted two blond women in short black skirts and long black eyelashes who seemed to be on their way to a party. Could it be that the party was the one they had hoped to find here, in the singles car?

  If so, it was hard to tell. The two women did not ask anyone if the train was headed downtown—wink, wink—and they sashayed off at Jay Street in Brooklyn without so much as a smile in anyone’s direction.

  But Mr. Brown’s hopes seemed as high as ever. As the train ascended the elevated tracks in Carroll Gardens and the setting sun streamed into the car, he looked out over the Hudson and saw the Statue of Liberty silhouetted against the horizon.

  “Now this is romance,” he said, mostly seriously. “This is the moment when you strike.”

  As the train headed back into Manhattan with the snorer and the Santa Claus and the sleeping boy aboard, Mr. Brown admitted, “I guess we’re still sort of waiting for our watershed moment.”

  Ms. Prentice helped him to define this. “The watershed moment is going to be when I meet someone on the train that I want to go out on a date with,” she said. “That’s when it’s going to be.”

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 10, 2002

  WAITING ON A TRAIN

  If you are standing on a subway platform in London or Barcelona or Washington and wondering when the next train will arrive, there is generally no great effort involved in finding out: look up at the colorful screens, the ones that want you to have a nice day, and watch as the electronic seconds count down to your ride.

  In New York, characteristically, much more talent is required.

  The most popular methods are, of course, the platform lean and the long tunnel stare, timeless images of urban impatience.

  Experienced commuters usually combine the stare with a subway distance technique that may have some relation to the sonar used by bats and which can help predict the proximity of the train simply from the size of its distant headlights.

  And true veterans take into account even more esoteric signs—the metallic pings of the tracks, the fetid breezes and the scurrying mice, which are the canaries of the mass-transit coal mine. In the end, though, even the most talented train spotter can misread these signs and watch sadly along the local track as an express blows by.

  So now, as New York City Transit draws up a new contract and prepares yet again to find a company to tow it into the electronic information age, there is hope that—finally, this time—these subway tracking skills will be rendered vestigial.

  For more than a decade, the agency has been trying to join its more technologically advanced counterparts and install a computer system that will allow train dispatchers to know something that most riders might be disturbed to learn the dispatchers do not already know: exactly where the trains are.

  In many ways, the system still works much as it did when the subway opened: the wheels and axles of the trains cause a short circuit along a section of running rail, illuminating a little red light on a big black map in a tiny room deep within the heart of the subway. This tells dispatchers where a train is, sort of, but not which train it is, exactly.

  In fact, the train is positively identified only when it comes into the station and subway workers lay eyes on it and jot down its car numbers on a handwritten sheet. A train supervisor once described this system as “kind of like watching the minute hand on a clock.”

  “It doesn’t give you a lot of details,” he said.

  If the professionals do not have the details, they cannot very well pass them on to the passengers, and so far the agency has had huge trouble—partly through its own oversights, critics say—in finding a company to help it build a system to collect those details.

  Its first effort to put passenger information screens into the system envisioned them being in 137 of the system’s 468 stations. It ended up putting them in only 51. And most of those screens are not tied into a central computer, meaning that they are sometimes manually operated and of little use in delivering accurate, real-time train information.

  “It usually is just a generic message that says ‘It’s pickpocket season!’ or ‘Have a nice day!’ or ‘Yada, yada, yada,’” said Paul Fleuranges, a spokesman for the agency. Karl Steel, an official in charge of finding a better system, added yesterday, “One of the lessons we learned is that if you’re giving wrong information, then sometimes it’s better not to do it at all.”

  The agency insists that it does want to give the right information, however, and so it is now in the middle of a compl
ex project to tie all the antiquated signal equipment on the numbered subway lines to a computer system that will track trains better and allow information to be passed to riders.

  A second project will modernize the signal equipment on most of the lettered lines, which is so antiquated that it cannot even be tied into computers. And subsequent projects are to bring information screens on which the numbers “3 … 2 … 1” will usually coincide with a train pulling into the station.

  Even with this in mind, it is probably not advisable to let your personal subway-tracking skills lapse just yet. If the projects go as planned—an “if” that grows larger with each failed effort—information signs will not start appearing until well after 2005.

  Until then, officials say, they are simply working much harder to improve the old-fashioned system of telling people where their trains are—with humans like Robin Anderson, who sits in a control center at DeKalb Avenue in Brooklyn. Every morning, she and a handful of colleagues are the ones who stare at the little lights on the big maps and translate what they see over loudspeakers in 155 stations.

  These days, most of those speakers do not sound quite as much like the teacher’s voice in the Charlie Brown television specials as they once did. But some still do.

  In those cases, it might be a good idea to learn a new subway-tracking skill, one advocated by Garrison Keillor when he lived in New York: upon entering the station he surveyed the platform and if it was full, he knew that a train was nigh.

  “It always makes me feel good,” he said, “knowing that some of the job of waiting has been done by other people.”

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED OCTOBER 15, 2002

  STAND CLEAR OF THE LOVE SEAT

  City life, especially in New York, requires countless daily calculations involving the fundamentals of physics: space, time, mass and energy.

  Can I really fit this couch into my apartment and still have enough room to live in it? Can I actually make it across six lanes of traffic on a blinking “Don’t Walk”? Can I legally put a broken 27-inch television, an old microwave and an entire set of barbells into the recycling? Can I possibly remain conscious for eight hours today after sleeping only three last night?