Subwayland Read online

  Then there is the thorny question combining all of these elements, the one that requires the most advanced form of urban reckoning:

  Can I carry it on the subway?

  It is not a problem unique to this city, but it is certainly confronted here more than anywhere else in the country. Even in other cities with mass transportation, car ownership has remained high, but New York has long been an exception. According to the 2000 census, 54 percent of city households do not own or lease a car. In Manhattan, in fact, 78 percent remain carless, a virtual republic of unrepentant pedestrians.

  In other words—while deliverymen and cab drivers sometimes fill the role here—the subway is this city’s communal station wagon, a freight train in all but name. While other Americans may arrange their purchases neatly in capacious car trunks, New Yorkers are towing theirs mightily through the turnstiles. While other Americans may strap surfboards atop PT Cruisers, New Yorkers are dragging theirs onto the A train to Far Rockaway.

  And while other Americans try to lock in a good radio station on the highway, New Yorkers are trying to figure out how to hang onto the pole in a packed train without losing control of the briefcase, the overcoat, the gym shoes, the large box of Pampers and the Big Brown Bag from Bloomingdale’s.

  This dilemma—balance versus baggage—has confronted subway riders virtually from the start. In late November 1905, only a year after the subway opened, The New York Times published an account of a man carrying a suspiciously large parcel wrapped in yellow paper, which fell from his arms at 72nd Street. “The crumpled top opened,” the story said, “and after a few kicks and flurries, a turkey, with an air of outraged dignity, strutted out on the floor.”

  Over the last two years, in an attempt to document the phenomenon, this columnist has kept a sporadic list of the most unwieldy cargo spotted aboard subway cars. If nothing else, it shows what human willpower can still accomplish without internal combustion—in fact, with little more than a MetroCard and a strong back.

  Among the entries are these:

  • November 2000—A man with a dolly wheels a mahogany-brown, four-drawer dresser onto the A train at Times Square. Riders comment on how nice it is. (The dresser, not the train.)

  • December 2001—A man on an N train in Sunset Park is seated, with a recently purchased Christmas tree at least eight feet tall clamped between his legs. Behind the tree he is reading a book.

  • September 2002—A man and his girlfriend carry a sousaphone onto a Q train in Midtown. He carries the body around his shoulders while she holds the brass bell on her lap. A woman sitting next to them, apparently not a music lover, looks very angry.

  Correspondents have also helped in this documentation, sending in their own strange cargo sightings and experiences. For example, a newspaper reporter’s wife told of how she carried a nine-foot whaler’s harpoon, a gift for her husband, on the train. The only real difficulty involved jamming the harpoon through the bars of a full-body turnstile, much the way that Captain Ahab might have jammed one into the ribs of the great whale. Unlike Ahab, she had some luck and caught the next train.

  Users of the Straphangers Campaign Web site submitted a subway cargo manifest that included a television, a huge decorated pumpkin, an office chair, a double stroller with a home entertainment system balanced on it and an entire love seat (“Guy had a couch in the middle of the subway car and was just relaxing as if this was not at all strange,” one rider wrote).

  If there were awards for subway portage, Michael Hernandez, a field organizer for the campaign, would undoubtedly be among the winners. He has taken a mini-refrigerator aboard the train, he said, and he once managed to get a four-foot houseplant home that way, alive.

  But even he admitted that he made significant errors in his urban physics when he decided to carry on a 10-foot-tall disassembled closet that he had bought at Ikea in Elizabeth, N.J., and brought back into the Port Authority terminal on the store’s free bus.

  “I guess I didn’t put enough thought into it,” Mr. Hernandez said recently. “I was, of course, smacking it into people. It was way too heavy, taking up way too much space.”

  He added, soberly, “It’s something I don’t ever want to do again.”

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED OCTOBER 29, 2002

  SUBWAY LULLABY

  It is hard to imagine a place less conducive to slumber: a rigid plastic seat beneath harsh fluorescent lights in a crowded, narrow, metal room that lurches and lists. Every few minutes the doors open, a two-tone alarm rings out, and a stranger announces instructions over a loudspeaker. The room, meanwhile, is filled with dozens of other people, including several crying babies, a bongo player and maybe the mayor of New York City, holding an early morning meeting with his staff about new taxes.

  In many places, such a room might be described as a sleep deprivation chamber, like the ones used in the late 1950’s to determine whether prospective astronauts had the right stuff.

  In New York City, such a room is known as a subway car, a pretty great place for a nap.

  “For me,” said Ginia Guzman, waking reluctantly on the downtown Q train yesterday morning, “it is the best place.”

  Ms. Guzman lives in Flushing and works as a housekeeper in Flatbush, Brooklyn. While her subway trip between those distant points might not always be reliable or pleasant, she can always count on one nice thing en route. “I sleep like a baby,” she said, rubbing her eyes as the train emerged into daylight on the Manhattan Bridge.

  Of course, if she had a choice she would naturally pick a more comfortable place to snooze—a couch, say, or a chair in a quiet room. But she lives in the city that never sleeps. Or, more accurately, the city that never sleeps when it is supposed to and certainly cannot catch up while cleaning a house in Flatbush.

  So Ms. Guzman positions herself at the end of a subway car bench, loops the strap of her bag protectively around her arm, tucks her chin into her chest and makes do. The subway may be lacking many things, but a certain kind of solitude is not one of them.

  Until yesterday, when a reporter gently woke her to inquire about her nap, no one else had ever bothered her while she slept, and she said she tended to sleep quite soundly.

  “After a while,” she explained, “you get good at it.”

  The art of the New York City subway nap—polished and perfected by everyone from stockbrokers to street messengers, often side by side—is actually a more recent phenomenon than most people realize. In the early days of the subway, the police regularly roused sleepers, relying on a section of the old state penal code that prohibited sleeping in public transit areas.

  In 1953, there was a fleeting moment of hope for nappers when City Magistrate J. Irwin Shapiro dismissed charges against some subway-car sleepers, declaring them to be “human souls whose rights may not be trampled upon” and admitting that he had dozed off on the subway himself.

  But then the police began charging sleepers, somewhat paradoxically, with disorderly conduct. And when the penal code was rewritten in the 1970’s, sleeping was generally lumped into the category of criminal loitering. So the golden era of unfettered subway napping did not really begin until 1987, when an appellate court ruled that arresting people for loitering in public transit areas was unconstitutional.

  Of course, the ruling mainly concerned homeless people who sought out the subway for much greater necessities than sleep, such as warmth and shelter. But a side benefit was to make the casual nap perfectly legal—as long as one manages it with some skill and does not slump over onto two or more seats, a violation of a subway administrative rule.

  Monday mornings are generally thick with subway sleepers, even snorers, as work rudely extracts people from their weekends. Yesterday morning did not disappoint. There was the busboy from a Greek restaurant in Astoria, who had worked a double shift and was rocking forward so wearily on the W train that his cigarettes almost spilled from his shirt pocket.

  There was the guy on the uptown No. 3 train, soundly sleeping th
ough his shiny eyes remained partly open and his teeth balanced a toothpick. “Is he dead?” a passenger asked.

  There was the 45-year-old off-duty engineer for New York City Transit, who did not want to give his name because he was afraid it might seem as if he were sleeping at the office. With some authority, he declared the R to be among the best sleeping trains, because it is slow and tends to rock side to side on its tracks in Manhattan.

  There was also Sharee Taylor, a 16-year-old high school senior, who slept on her way to a college fair in the Bronx. Like most experienced nappers, she has developed a kind of internal alarm clock that wakes her reliably at her stop, though she admitted, “One time I was on the way from Brooklyn to Manhattan and I woke up in Queens.”

  Tuvia Yamnik, a cantor, never naps, but he said he loved to watch the nappers and wonder what they were dreaming. “Life is tough,” he said. “Maybe they have a fight with their husband, their wife. They dream everything is O.K.”

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JANUARY 14, 2003

  DOWN AT THE LOST AND FOUND

  Remember that night on the subway when you had a few too many and somehow lost everything you were carrying: your watch, your coat and your glasses, along with your bicycle, Bible, coffee maker, violin, VCR, power saw, pool cue, fax machine and favorite box of Statue of Liberty figurines?

  If you were thinking of trying to reclaim those things, you have sadly waited too long. Yesterday morning, deep within the recesses of Pennsylvania Station, as a water cooler gurgled and trains thundered overhead, all of your possessions became the property of the highest bidder.

  And in the business of redistributing the wealth that goes unclaimed in the city’s vast transit system, it turns out that a high bid is a decidedly relative term.

  “I have here lot No. 35,” called out Cornelius A. Heaney, the hopeful auctioneer. “Eight boxes of assorted Bibles. Who will give me $40?”

  Silence. Water gurgling. Trains thundering.

  “With these boxes,” Mr. Heaney added, doing his best W. C. Fields, “you can open your own hotel.”

  Silence, gurgling, thunder.

  Finally, he dropped the opening bid and for a mere $20 unloaded most of the Scripture misplaced in the city’s subways and buses over the past five years, since the last time New York City Transit’s Lost Property Unit held an auction to try to clear its crowded shelves.

  “God,” Mr. Heaney complained at one point to the 52 people sitting before him, carefully biding their bid paddles. “I’m giving this stuff away.”

  For Charlotte Roseburgh, the director of the unit and the woman in charge of cataloging all the lost stuff, giving it away must have sounded like a great idea yesterday. As she describes it, the subway’s lost and found is much more a place of loss than of finding.

  In fact, if democracy is a form of government predicated in part on the sanctity of property, a look around the Lost Property Unit and its tens of thousands of unclaimed things can make one a little worried about the state of the nation. “I cannot understand,” she said, “how someone loses a bike. Don’t they miss it? Don’t they need it?”

  Apparently not, judging from two lots yesterday of 25 bikes, most of which were bought for $80 by Darnell Owens, an amateur comedian from the Bronx, who later spotted a couple of sad examples sitting on the auction floor and said, “I really hope mine don’t look like that.”

  People apparently also did not miss or need their calculators (58), beepers (285), radios (59), CD players (77) or small televisions (3). Or, for that matter, their violins (5), guitars (4), clarinets (13), flutes (3), trumpets (3) or a decent marching band’s worth of other instruments, including a box of tambourines and a saxophone won for $175 by Kenya Nkhrumah, who does not play the saxophone.

  “My daughter does,” he explained, adding that he had not seen the sax and hoped it played a little. “I went on faith,” he said. “Pig in a poke.”

  After seeing so many odd, smelly, useless, frightening and often unclassifiable personal possessions, Ms. Roseburgh said that it was very difficult for her to name the strangest. The now-legendary prosthetic legs predated her time as the head of the office, though false teeth and bridgework still arrive occasionally. There was the man who lost a Minolta copying machine but came back for it. (People have six months to claim property before it is marked to be sold.)

  Behind her on a shelf were items that even the auctioneer did not think he could sell, like a plastic hippopotamus, a windup walking eyeball, a rubber skeleton and an old book about rheumatism.

  Ms. Roseburgh said that some people, out of the goodness of their hearts or the depths of their psychosis, tried from time to time to turn in items, only to be rejected. “When I was a booth clerk, I had people turn in pennies,” she said. “Once, somebody turned in some yogurt.”

  Recently, there was a hospital vial full of a tea-colored liquid. “I don’t know what that was,” she said. “Sometimes people are just lonely, and they want to turn in something so they can have someone to talk to.”

  It seemed as if a few of the bidders yesterday made their way underground with the same lonesome motives, sitting on the benches and staring ahead with strange, empty smiles. But enough serious players also arrived for the auction to be declared a qualified success by Mr. Heaney, who once auctioned off an entire subway car.

  Yesterday was not nearly so glamorous, he said, but at least everything sold—right down to six boxes of unclaimed keys for a dollar.

  One bidder, a man named Ariel with a ponytail and a chain on his wallet—no last names, please—said he was leaving quite satisfied, having won the bidding for a box of 210 metal charms and pendants at $250.

  What did he plan to do with all of them? He looked at his questioner suspiciously. “That’s something I really don’t want to get into.”

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JANUARY 14, 2003

  6

  DISASTER DOWN UNDER

  Destruction from above: Eight months after the World Trade Center attack, rubble remained like a tombstone at the Rector Street station.

  LAST TRAIN

  When Carlos Johnson woke at his usual hour—3:30 a.m.—on Tuesday, September 11, he did not know that hundreds of miles away, a 190-ton jet sat on a runway in Boston, bound for the very place he was bound that day.

  He did not know, as he parked his No. 1 subway train at its terminal in the Bronx, as he took his morning break, going downstairs for a bowl of oatmeal and a slice of toast, that the jet was closing its doors, about to pull away from the gate.

  And he did not know that when he rolled out of the terminal for his second trip south that day—his train designated Van Cortlandt 748, for 7:48 a.m.—that it would be the last time he would travel to the end of the 83-year-old subway tunnels that have been his office and his occupation for the past nine years.

  Mr. Johnson is not a romantic about the subway. It is a job, a reliable one that has helped him and his wife, Rhonda, raise three children in Woodbridge, N.J. But as a motorman who has spent most of his career on the No. 1 line to South Ferry, which threaded him through the heart of the World Trade Center, he knew every part of the line as well as he knew his own name.

  He also knew, at least by their faces, many of the people that he saw day by day flooding out of his train, up the south stairs of the Cortlandt Street station, bound for the long elevator ride up the towers.

  And before he became a motorman, Mr. Johnson was a track worker who—even he finds this strange now—spent much of his time, long nights in the dust and heat, working inside tunnels of the No. 1 line in Lower Manhattan. “It seemed like fate said: ‘This is your part of the subway,’” he said.

  Like hundreds of thousands of people in the city, Mr. Johnson remembers events that morning with powerful clarity. He remembers that when he pulled into the Chambers Street station, one stop north of the World Trade Center, the digital clock at south end of the station clicked 8:45 as he watched.

  The doors closed and he sped south. He pulled in
to the Cortlandt Street stop and brought the train to a halt at exactly 8:48, just as the first jet slammed into the north tower. But he still had no idea of the role he was playing in that day’s events, taking one of the last trains through what would later be known as ground zero.

  “People who had gotten out of the train started running back down the stairs,” he recalled last Saturday, resting in Harlem after returning to work on another line. “And there were other people still trying to get up the stairs. I saw people get knocked down. “And I heard someone say: ‘They’re shooting upstairs! They’re shooting! Someone has a gun!’”

  In the list of dangerous things that Mr. Johnson has thought about encountering on his train, even a gunman seemed on the outer edge of possibility until that day. “You never imagine worse things. You worry about a derailment. Maybe a bomb in the train, but the odds of that seem so long. And so when I heard someone say that there was shooting upstairs, it seemed like a huge thing. I don’t panic, but I said to my partner, the conductor, ‘Let’s get this train out of here.’”

  He said he envisioned the gunfight spilling down onto his train. As he said this, he smiled and shook his head. “If I had only known what was really going on right over my head,” he said. “I didn’t hear anything. I didn’t feel anything. The lights didn’t even flicker.”

  He took his train downtown to the South Ferry station, where he finally got a supervisor on his radio and heard that it was not gunfire, but some kind of explosion. He still did not know whether to believe it. Rumors and confusion, he knew, travel down the tracks much faster than the trains.

  The strangest thing he remembers now is that as he headed north again, taking his train back toward the burning tower just as another plane was minutes away from hitting the other tower, he saw no pandemonium. In fact, he picked up only a few people beneath the World Trade Center, and no one on the platform appeared panicked anymore.