Subwayland Page 5

  But before Mr. Diaz’s friend could burn the effigy, he decided to take one last, drunken, dance with his lost love. And the crowds watching on the street went crazy with applause.

  “That is when I decided once and for all,” Mr. Diaz said. “The next doll I am going to make will be not to burn but to dance with.”

  He shrugged yesterday between dances and wiped the sweat from his face. “And so,” he said, “here I am today.”

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 24, 2002

  LEFT OUTSIDE LOOKING IN

  If it is true that great art is born of great suffering, what happens when there is only a little suffering?

  In fact, what happens when the suffering is so common that tens of thousands of New Yorkers probably experienced it this very morning and the plot of their collective tragedy could be summarized like this: Hero hurries into subway station, hero sees train, hero runs for train and misses train. Doors close abruptly in hero’s face with a dirgeful ding-dong. Flourish. Exeunt motorman, conductor and train.

  It is clearly not the stuff of Antigone or even Edvard Munch (though screaming with hands clamped to head is a way that many tragic heroes have been known to react to missing the train).

  The misfortune is infinitely smaller, more personal and more trivial. Yet when a New York video artist named Neil Goldberg began several years ago to notice the faces of people in the subway as they missed their trains, he was struck by the miniature portraits of loss that he saw on platforms all around him.

  The loss, of course, was only that of a ride in a crowded subway car, and another would be along shortly to offer the same inglorious opportunity. But the faces seemed to resonate something more than urban impatience—something about fate itself, about how we all view ours, even as reflected in the most mundane daily transactions.

  As Mr. Goldberg describes it—in a way that places a missed subway squarely among the subjects of the world’s greatest art—the experience is about nothing less than “what happens when you want something and the world has other plans.”

  So since this summer, Mr. Goldberg, 39, has been venturing into subway stations with a handheld Sony video camera to record these ubiquitous three-second transit dramas. He has stood by stairways and doorways from 125th Street to Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, waiting for the subway to come and for the small, bad thing to happen to his fellow citizens.

  “Sometimes,” he admitted the other day just after 7 a.m., filming at the West Fourth Street station in Manhattan, “I almost find myself rooting for people to miss the train—and that’s not really something you want to be doing with your life.”

  But over weeks of filming, often during the most sweltering mornings of the summer, he has learned several things. Among them is that capturing quintessential images of subway disappointment, in a system awash in them, is not always easy. Sometimes, he would film for three hours, with trains arriving every five minutes, and would leave with only one good shot. (“That liberal door-opening policy,” he complained jokingly the other day, as a nice conductor held the doors open for latecomers.)

  He also found that the reactions of those who missed the train were a lot less operatic than he had expected. People grimace or roll their eyes. They exhale loudly. Some look around, as if for moral support. Sometimes they just look painfully embarrassed and smile strangely, as if they have done something stupid to cause the doors to close on them.

  Most interesting and striking in some of the 17 hours of footage Mr. Goldberg has taken so far is the way that commuters briefly let down their subway masks, allow their faces to register real emotion and then, realizing where they are, quickly bring the masks back up again.

  “It makes it almost hard for me to watch sometimes,” Mr. Goldberg said last week in his studio, where he will eventually distill the hours of recorded faces into probably five minutes of pure disappointment. “Somehow, it’s almost sad.”

  His past work, some of which has been shown at the New York Video Festival and on PBS, has also dealt with these forgotten corners of human emotion, a theme he often classifies under the heading of “Hallelujah Anyway,” a title of one of his previous gallery shows.

  In essence, he says, it is about how “life can be an insane and depressing drag and thank God for it.”

  He has, for example, videotaped storeowners in the weary earlymorning ritual of hauling up their security gates. He has taken a music box around the city and filmed it in various places playing the hymn “How Great Thou Art.” He is at work on a documentary about what he sees as the almost mystical nature of Wall Street futures trading.

  Mr. Goldberg said he tried once before to do a project in the subway, in which he wanted to ask token clerks to read a piece of Whitman’s “Song of Myself” through their microphones. (It includes a passage that sounds almost as if it is referring to the subway: “Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical, I and this mystery here we stand.”) In the end, though, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority decided not to allow its clerks to partake in any literary moonlighting.

  It is unclear what the agency thinks of Mr. Goldberg’s latest project, but most subway riders, when told about it the other morning at West Fourth Street, simply shrugged and kept their subway masks firmly in place.

  “Personally, I don’t get upset when I miss the train,” said Steven Badice, a dealer in women’s garments. “There’s always another one coming.”

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED OCTOBER 8, 2002

  TAKING THE TRAIN HOME

  Paul Kronenberg of Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, says he is trying hard to break out of “this subway buff syndrome,” the one that has held him in its stubborn grip for at least 50 years now.

  But it cannot be easy, especially when he goes to sleep each night and rises each morning to see a motorman’s cab from an old subway car bearing down on him from a corner of his bedroom like a rail-bound Flying Dutchman.

  Or when he heads to his kitchen, past a subway sign in the hall that says “To the Trains.” Or when he looks at his broken player piano, atop which sits a destination marker from a D train, seeming to announce that his piano is Coney Island–bound.

  One afternoon last week, he gingerly stepped around his latest creation, a sizable piece of evidence that his subway fascinations have not, in fact, faded at all: a life-size reproduction, on his living room floor, of an elaborate 1904 Times Square mosaic, rendered in construction paper instead of tile. He estimates that he has painstakingly cut out and pasted together more than 2,500 tiny pieces of paper so far.

  “Wow,” he observes, pausing to consider this fact. “I really am crazy.”

  If so, Mr. Kronenberg is the kind of crazy many New Yorkers long to be. In a city filled with people who live to work, often to their detriment, he has carefully worked only enough to live exactly the kind of life he wants to live. (For the last nine years, he has been a math tutor, “yet another in my line of underachieving careers,” he says with sheepish pride.)

  This painstaking reduction of ambition has allowed Mr. Kronenberg, in a city teeming with part-time buffs of everything from egg creams to elevators, to become something of a rarity: a full-time buff.

  He might not know the names of every kind of subway car to have rumbled beneath the city, as some buffs seem to. He might not be able to describe in excruciating detail, as some can, how the Chrystie Street connection severed the Nassau Street Loop in 1967.

  But Mr. Kronenberg, 58, is still believed to be the only man in the five boroughs who has collected the salvaged parts of an old subway car and, adding only lumber and dark-olive paint, built a highly faithful mock-up of a motorman’s cab in his own bedroom, complete with controls, windows, a folding gate, an express sign and a hand-operated windshield wiper. You might think of it as the subway version of the Johnny Cash song, “One Piece at a Time,” about an auto factory worker who assembles a Cadillac from spare parts.

  “When I show it to people,” Mr. Kronenberg says of his creation, “right away
they know that I’m not married.”

  He built the cab more than two decades ago, while working as a driver for a Brooklyn company called the Brighton Laundry, which had a plant near the huge Coney Island subway yard.

  The process of getting the parts was, he recalls, only slightly more complex than it might be today if they showed up on eBay, though far less legal: “They were selling off all the old cars for scrap and there was this young foreman. Basically, you’d go up to the door and tell him what you wanted and he’d tell you what he wanted, you know; and you’d come to some sort of agreement.”

  Today, the cab shares Mr. Kronenberg’s cluttered blue bedroom along with an old Fairbanks, Morse tube radio, a reproduction of George Tooker’s famously creepy painting “The Subway” and shelves full of books on topics ranging from existentialism to “How to Survive Your Parents.”

  He said the cab has been sitting there so long, at the foot of his single bed, that he notices it no more than he would an old Barcalounger. So he is always a little surprised by visitors’ startled reactions to it.

  “I tend not to show it to people right away,” he admits, “because I’m afraid that it might freak them out.”

  This solicitude, though, appears to have more to do with courtesy than real fear of what people might think of Mr. Kronenberg, who said he long ago made peace with the fact that he was paddling up a tributary far from the mainstream.

  Or as he put it, his eyes twinkling through the thick glasses that make him look a little like the cartoonist R. Crumb: “I have no image problem. I don’t take myself seriously enough to have one.”

  After delving over the years into other odd areas of research—old radios, Greyhound buses, cash registers and Otis elevators—Mr. Kronenberg said last week he had found two new ones that might help supplant his subway obsession.

  One is Skee-Ball, the old-fashioned arcade game, a version of which he is considering building intact in his living room. The other, he says, smiling, is a very nice woman from Texas, whom he met recently and who seems to appreciate some of the very things he appreciates.

  He is still uncertain, however, whether a motorman’s cab, a Skee-Ball alley and a new woman friend are completely compatible in the life of just one Brooklyn man. “Something might have to go.”

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 5, 2002

  THE SAW MAN

  It was Good Friday, and at the end of the Union Square subway station near the police office, the one-man ministry of Moses E. Josiah, maestro of the musical saw, was getting under way.

  He was playing one of his favorite instruments, a 28-inch, two-octave solid steel tenor saw made by the Mussehl & Westphal specialty saw company of East Troy, Wis., whose newspaper advertisements once encouraged musically inclined readers to “amaze your friends with this sensation of radio, vaudeville, orchestra and lodge.”

  Since its heyday in the 1930’s, the saw has mostly disappeared from those forms of musical entertainment. A couple of the forms have disappeared as well. But Mr. Josiah, who taught himself to play his father’s handsaw at 17 in a village on the coast of Guyana, has never wavered in his devotion to the haunting powers of a humble household tool.

  It might no longer show up much in soaring concert halls, he says, but the saw is perfect for that vast musical venue known as the New York City subway, for several reasons. Among them: it is easy to carry, it is hard to break, it does not have a high resale value and not many people realize that beautiful music can be played on a handsaw, making it a great crowd pleaser.

  But the best reason of all is that the sound is wonderfully subway-proof. While guitars, saxophones and even trumpets lose decisively in decibel contests with approaching trains, the notes of the musical saw rise above the roar, something like the chime made by rubbing the rim of a crystal glass.

  “People have told me that they can be at the other end of a station and all of the sudden they can hear me, like I’m right next to them,” he says. “They say it sounds like the voice of an angel in their ear.”

  Every day that he plays, but especially on this Friday, that is the analogy Mr. Josiah is hoping his listeners will make. He hopes they will hear a holy message emanating from his saw. In the process, he also hopes that this gratifying message will make them grateful enough to throw a few more dollars into his bag. It has been a very slow winter.

  “I can play the calypso, and I can play the classical,” he explained, rubbing rosin from a white box onto his worn violin bow. “I can play anything you want. But today is a sacred day, and today is for gospel.”

  A reporter looking for Mr. Josiah heard him long before seeing him, picking out the sounds of the hymn “He Touched Me.” Mr. Josiah, 74, was seated on a small black folding chair, hunched slightly over the saw, which was laid across a white hand towel on his left leg.

  The saw handle lay against his right leg, which moved like a violinist’s fingers creating vibrato, as his right hand bowed the flat edge of the steel.

  The saw, a gift, was once gold-plated, Mr. Josiah said, but the gold has mostly worn away with use. On the top of the blade, these words are engraved: “Maestro Moses Josiah, Master Sawyer.”

  “I didn’t give myself the name maestro,” he explained. “All over the United States and the world, that is the name they have given me. I know the Lord blessed me. This is a gift he has given me.”

  As the afternoon wore on, Mr. Josiah used his gift tirelessly for several hours. He labored over “The Holy City,” and “Master, the Tempest Is Raging,” particularly appropriate just after noon, when it seemed that trains were pounding into the station, and into his head, every three seconds. By 1:30 p.m, Mr. Josiah was becoming a little disappointed that his gift was not bringing in a few more gifts of the worldly kind.

  Junior Bennett, an office administrator, stopped to listen, transfixed, and gave a dollar. Ihor Slabicky, a software developer, fled from an inferior saxophone performance on the L platform and also contributed. But most of the donations were very small change, and at one point a disturbed woman even tried to give him a piece of bread.

  “You know, New York is a very interesting place,” Mr. Josiah said, stopping to rest his aching left hand. “Some panhandlers—panhandlers—make more money in an hour than I do.”

  He picked up the bow again and this time decided to venture into a few devotional tunes much more on the nonevangelical side, including “You Light Up My Life,” and “Danny Boy.” At one point, he turned off the tape player he used to accompany him and did a slow, ethereal rendition of “God Bless America.”

  “I like to call that version saw-cappella,” he said, smiling.

  But the biggest crowd pleaser was decidedly his version of “Imagine,” by John Lennon, whose lyrics he either did not know or chose to ignore the meaning of. The song drew applause, a handful of dollars and the adoration of a woman who swayed to the music and sang. “Yeah,” she said.

  Before the reporter left that day, Mr. Josiah thanked him but then called out: “As the Bible says, it’s more blessed to give than to receive. Now I know you’re not going to leave here without giving a little something, are you?”

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED APRIL 22, 2003

  SUBWAY WHIZ KIDS

  At least by the age of 4, and at least in New York City, children have already begun to emulate their parents in one very noticeable way: they, too, have cultivated obsessions.

  For most children, these obsessions tend to be the ones of sunny youth, circa 2003, ranging from Harry Potter to pterodactyls, from Spider-Man to highly specialized science kits. (“What are the basic ingredients of soda pop?”)

  But for a much more single-minded group of single-digit New Yorkers, there is an obsession far weightier and a list of questions vastly more difficult. So difficult, in fact, that most adult residents of this city will consider them only under duress. For example: When does the Z train run and what is its last stop in Manhattan? Will the W train terminate at Whitehall Street next year? How many con
nections can you make from the Franklin Avenue shuttle? What is the only subway line that does not go into Manhattan?

  To answer these questions and many more, let us introduce our three panelists today on “It’s a Subway Whiz Kid.” In order of age, they are Alexander Puri of the Upper East Side, who will be 5 next month and whose favorite subway line (at least this week) is the B. Next is Aidan Langston of Park Slope, Brooklyn, who turned 6 last month and is bold enough to favor the V train, making him probably its only fan. Finally, there is Jonah Gaynor, 6, who lives in Greenwich Village and is particularly partial to the G. The three have joined us today because they represent a special class of highly intelligent and high-achieving urban children: They are the smallest subway buffs. Still almost short enough to sprint under a turnstile without bumping their heads, they have forgotten more about the subway than most MetroCard-carrying adults have ever known.

  In other cities, children with such an aptitude for geography and transportation might be able to identify different types of S.U.V.’s or navigate the megamall. In New York, subway whiz kids are more helpful: they can tell you how to get from Middle Village, Queens, to Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, in only two transfers.

  And this knowledge does not come without hard work. It involves hours of late-night reading. “At 3 years old, in the same way some kids take teddy bears to bed, he was taking the subway map to bed and studying it,” said Sandeep Puri, Alexander’s father, watching his son the other day as he sat in rapt concentration in the middle of an oversize subway map.

  Being a bona fide subway whiz kid also involves untiring field work. Alan Gaynor, an architect, and his wife, Sharon Silbiger, a doctor, have taken Jonah to more than 50 stations. They have explored the wonders of the L line and the joys of the routes to Coney Island. They have twice taken the express bus to Staten Island, just to take it back again. “There are some times,” his father reports admiringly, “he’s forced me to go to Queens and we’ve never gotten out of the subway.”