Subwayland Page 6

  As his mother explained, “It’s not the destination. It’s the process.”

  She quickly added of her husband and herself, who are not untiring, “For us, the destination is part of the process.”

  Aidan Langston’s father, Chris, who works for a health-care foundation, often enjoys playing Watson to his son’s Sherlock on such fact-finding trips. But the other day, in the family’s house in Brooklyn, he asked a quite dangerous question: If Aidan could choose any route from school in Chinatown back home to Brooklyn, what would it be?

  His son did not hesitate. His ideal trip, he said, would be to take the F from East Broadway to the Forest Hills stop in Queens, then transfer to the V, ride that to Second Avenue on the Lower East Side and then catch the F at that station back home to Park Slope. (Note to non–New Yorkers: This is like going from Dallas to Detroit by way of Honolulu.)

  There was a moment of stunned silence in the house, followed by a burst of adult laughter—laughter tinged with the knowledge that someone would undoubtedly be making that long journey someday soon, because he would insist. (Aidan’s mother, a New York Times reporter, was once scolded by her son for eating a knish on the subway. The rules, he reminded her, forbid eating.)

  Parents of subway buff children—the buffs are overwhelmingly boys—say that they see the transit system as an excellent teaching tool for a city child. After all, the subway involves colors and numbers and letters. It involves rules and geographical facts and hard-to-pronounce words, like Sutphin Boulevard and Mosholu Parkway.

  But for the subway whiz kid, there is a much bigger attraction: knowing more than anyone else, particularly the parents. Like little Jedi knights, the buffs tend to get the Force and then quickly humble their elders. This group includes transit reporters for large metropolitan daily newspapers.

  One recently made the mistake of asking Aidan Langston when the Z train ran.

  “Only rush hours,” he replied.

  “What about weekends?” the reporter asked.

  Aidan looked weary and disappointed, as if he’d explained this a thousand times. “Are there rush hours on weekends? I don’t think so.”

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED MAY 27, 2003

  SHORT STORIES FOR THE LONG RIDE HOME

  Ever since the day it opened, and for obvious reasons, the subway has been as much a supermarket as a means of transportation.

  Daily, it delivers a group of prospective consumers numbering in the millions. August Belmont, the system’s chief financier, sensed the potential and tried to tap into it by plastering the early subway with hundreds of tin-framed advertisements for everything from rye whiskey to washing powder.

  Over the years, there have been cigar stands, flower stands, newspaper stands, hot dog stands, weighing machines, chewing gum machines, a record store and an army of hardworking immigrants who wander the trains selling AA batteries, toy cellphones, lighted yo-yos and plastic sticks that make funny sounds when you wiggle them. Once, this reporter spotted a well-used one-piece bathing suit for sale at the Second Avenue stop on the F line.

  So it is in the grand tradition that a small, friendly 27-year-old woman named Adrian Brune set up shop about two months ago to sell her wares at Times Square. Her “shop” is a very common one for low-budget subway commerce, consisting of a small cardboard box, behind which she sits with her back against the wall. But what differentiates Ms. Brune from her competitors are her unique handmade products, advertised in a hand-lettered sign on the sides of the box.

  “Struggling writer w/ good short stories for sale: $2 each,” it says, adding in parentheses, “Master’s from Columbia; bad economy.”

  In other words, Ms. Brune is a rookie in what the writer Terry Southern once called the “quality lit game,” but instead of trying to sell her work through publishers, she is going straight to the reading public. This would be a brave decision, if it were one she made herself. In actual fact, she says, it was made for her by the publishers.

  She was at the point where she had to start selling her possessions or start trying to sell her work, she said last Friday, sitting on the floor of the Grand Central subway station, where she has relocated because the police there seem to have a deeper appreciation for nonfiction prose than those at Times Square. (“I’ve only been kicked out of here three or four times,” she said with appreciation in her voice.)

  Ms. Brune, who was raised in Tulsa and came to New York by way of Chicago and Boston, says that she originally conceived of her subway sales job as a form of “protest slash performance art.” After graduating from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism last year, she tried in vain to find full-time work but landed only occasional freelance jobs. She was angry at New York, she said, and wanted to find a way to let the city know it.

  But then a funny thing happened: she discovered that low-priced, cheaply copied, heartfelt short memoirs held together with paper clips actually sell pretty well in the subway.

  In fact, on good days she sells out of them, unloading 20 copies or more of each of her three stories. (One is about the death of her stepmother, with whom she was very close; a second is about online dating and a third is about a whirlwind romance she had with another woman at Columbia. She is at work on a fourth story about another romance.)

  Last Friday afternoon, Ms. Brune was doing a very brisk business in the corridor leading to the Times Square shuttle. As a salesperson, she tends to comport herself with ease, something like a country-store clerk selling overalls to farmers.

  “You like short stories?” she says to the undecided. “Try this one.”

  “Hey, have a good one now,” she says as they walk away.

  When a man in a baseball cap walked up, she gave him her friendly sales pitch. “You want action or satire?” she asked.

  “Action,” he said finally and forked over two bucks for the whirlwind romance. Ms. Brune folded the bills into her pocket. “Guys like the action story,” she said.

  In the space of about two hours, she had sold more than a dozen stories, some to satisfied repeat customers like Orlando Fonseca II, who had also bought the whirlwind romance story and gave it a big thumbs up. “It reminded me of some of the stupid things I did,” he told Ms. Brune, smiling.

  She says that she has never had any customers demand their money back, though one man did return a story, apparently disappointed that she is gay. “I think he was a little sweet on me,” she said.

  Of course, the subway is not always the most genteel sales environment. Once, she spent the whole afternoon with a rambling drunk at her side. The same day, she said, “a slam poet—or whatever he was—came up and slam-poeted me.”

  Some people, most often women in business suits, look at her behind her box, well dressed and well fed, and roll their eyes. But others seem to understand. In fact, one woman recently gave her a $10 bill for a single story.

  “O.K., maybe she thought this was about charity,” Ms. Brune said. “Or maybe she just thought I was undervaluing my work.”

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JUNE 10, 2003

  SUBWAY SCHOOL

  The following are not the kinds of things you typically find at a subway station:

  • A poster warning that pinkeye might be going around.

  • A nice woman handing out apple juice.

  • A group of Brooklynites sitting in a circle, singing, “The more we get together, the happier we will be!”

  • A group of Brooklynites weeping openly. (O.K., you might actually find this in the subway.)

  But if you go to the Prospect Park station on the Q line in Brooklyn, and choose the wrong door, you may find all of these things just about any weekday morning, along with even more unusual sights.

  For example, if you had been there yesterday morning, you could have watched as a Brooklynite named Colin Hamingson stared thoughtfully out a window at a subway train, and then, in a kind of experimental gesture, licked the window.

  “I like the subway,” he announced.

/>   It is highly unlikely that you will walk through that wrong door at the station. The people behind it have put an electronic lock on it, and a second door behind it with a second lock, because as much as they do not want random people wandering in, they want even less to have anyone inside wandering out and onto the subway.

  That is because many of those inside are just learning how to say “subway.” Some still wear diapers. None of them have MetroCards.

  They are charges of the Maple Street School, a 25-year-old nursery school that moved in September into an old retail space inside the station, making it probably the only subway-station nursery school in the country.

  In the process, the school placed two of the biggest worries of many New Yorkers—commuting and child care—in close proximity in a daring effort to ease both. The aboveground subway station is on the other side of a thick wall and so it is not easy, once inside the school, to tell that you are still, technically, in the subway.

  There are some reminders, though. In a fire stairway, there is a patch of the original tile work from the station, circa 1905. Sometimes you can hear the roar of the train, even over the roar of 40 toddlers. As in the subway, there is also a smattering of graffiti, though in the school it is in crayon, not spray paint.

  Undoubtedly the best interface with the subway is in the upstairs rear of the school, where a small window allows one to gaze right down onto the open-air subway tracks.

  For an urban child of a certain age, this window is better than television and almost as good as chocolate.

  “If the littlest kids are crying, it’s one of the things we do,” said Wendy Cole, the school’s director and a teacher. “We put them up there on the table so they can look out. I have one little girl it works like magic for. She’s transfixed.”

  So were Colin Hamingson, 3, and his friends, Cameron Gipson, 3, and Marko Read, 4, yesterday morning. They kneeled side by side at the window, like a panel of experts, closely studying a motionless Franklin Avenue Shuttle train on a storage track. Marko Read, speaking for the group, reported, “It’s broke, I think.”

  The parents who run the Maple Street School as a cooperative had always hoped they could move their school closer to the subway. They never expected it to be quite this close.

  Ultimately, they chose the site because it was close to Prospect Park and because the appendage to the station had 2,800 relatively inexpensive square feet in which to relocate their school, which has migrated over the years from Midwood Street to Lincoln Road to Maple Street to Nostrand Avenue, outgrowing each location.

  Had the parents known what lay ahead in turning part of an almost century-old subway station into a school, they probably would not have done it, said Kendall Christiansen, board chairman of the school.

  The space, abandoned for five years, looked like the subway had run through it instead of near it. “As I like to say, it was well ventilated and hydrated,” Mr. Christiansen said. There were traces of toxic solvent, left as a kind of parting gift by a former tenant, a dry cleaner. There was the mighty bureaucracy of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to negotiate. There were grants to cobble together and locks to install to calm parents worried about their children riding the Q train prematurely.

  Four years and $850,000 later, the parents can be forgiven for feeling as if their school will never quite be finished. The other day, Mr. Christiansen was conducting a tour when Sarah Prud’homme, a mother of two, entered. “There’s this guy outside,” she reported, “some kind of a roofer, who says he wants to get paid.”

  Despite the renovation blues, the parents seem to be exceedingly proud of their pioneering subway school. The children, for their part, take it all in stride. “Of course I go to school in the subway,” Ayla Safran, 4 and three-quarters years old, declared. “That’s where people go to school.”

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED DECEMBER 11, 2001

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  UNDERGROUND GOVERNMENT: CIVIL SERVANTS AND SUBWAY SHERIFFS

  The gears of the machine: It takes more than 20,000 workers to keep the subways running. Most of them have great vocal chords.

  THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG-DISTANCE MOTORMAN

  At work last Friday, Wayne McLamore drove 62 miles. This was not so bad, considering that he used to drive 124 miles. And especially considering that his coworkers can sometimes cover 155, which is like driving from Midtown to the Maryland border.

  “Seniority,” he said, winking. “Seniority does that for you.”

  Mr. McLamore is not a traveling salesman. He is not a state trooper. He does not drive a tractor-trailer. In fact, the territory he and his colleagues traverse every day does not even take them beyond the bounds of New York City—simply from Queens to Brooklyn to Manhattan, Manhattan to Brooklyn to Queens.

  They are the motormen and motorwomen of the A train. And in the world of subway drivers, they are the long-haul truckers.

  From its farthest Queens terminal at Far Rockaway to the other end at 207th Street in northern Manhattan, the A line covers 31 miles, the longest run in the system, according to transit officials. (The runners-up are the F line at 29 miles and the D at 25.8.)

  If there is a place in the city that can be said to feel like the country, the A is the train that goes all the way there.

  It starts within smelling distance of the Atlantic in the Rockaways. It slices across Jamaica Bay, where gulls drop clams on the tracks to shatter their shells. But then it leaves behind its pastoral trappings and travels beneath the shadows of jets roaring forth from Kennedy International Airport. It deposits pony players at Aqueduct Race Track. It veers north into Ozone Park. And then it dives through the dense heart of Brooklyn, goes under the riverbed and rolls beneath Manhattan from end to end.

  Mr. McLamore, a former Floridian with a big gold earring in his left ear and 18 years under his belt on the A train, has other responsibilities now, and no longer has to make two round trips through this vast terrain, the way he used to.

  “I’ve got to tell you,” he says, “that will take the fight right out of you.”

  But to spend a morning in the motorman’s cab of an eight-car A train with Mr. McLamore as he makes the one-and-a-half-hour trip from 207th to Far Rockaway is still to feel that you have left the subway and found yourself on a less circumscribed means of transportation. “The one piece of advice I give new operators on this train is this: Go to the bathroom before you start,” Mr. McLamore says. “It’s a long ride.”

  Mr. McLamore has three favorite stretches. One is the trip across the bay, where in the spring he will sometimes poke his head out of the cab window to take in the salty air. “But don’t put that in the paper,” he said.

  The other two favorites are both long, unfettered straightaways, conducive to speed. One is the express run between 125th Street and 59th Street. The other is the smile-shaped tube under the East River, where the downhill portion can propel the train above 50 miles per hour.

  Lou Brusati, the A line’s superintendent, had come along that day for the ride, and as the train barreled through the tunnel, you could see him smile in the darkness of the motorman’s cab.

  “This is the ride,” he said.

  “Yes,” Mr. McLamore agreed. “This is the ride.”

  (There was a time, back when the subway system was in very bad shape, when Mr. McLamore would drive trains that did not have enough power to make it up the uphill curve in the river tube with a full load of passengers. “We used to have to stop at Canal Street and dump everybody out,” he recalled.)

  Mr. McLamore does not really have any least-favorite spots along the line, except that for a while he really loathed the Utica Avenue station in Brooklyn, where a man would position himself at the front of the platform every day and launch a large wad of spit at the train’s windshield.

  There was no violence done, but suffice it to say that last Friday, there was no man waiting to spit on Mr. McLamore’s train.

  Asked what was the strangest thing he has seen on the A trai
n in his 18 years, Mr. McLamore paused for a minute at the end of his shift. He conferred with the train’s conductor, Mary Tillman.

  They both decided that it was the pigeons.

  “Pigeons will get on at Far Rock looking for food that the car cleaners didn’t get,” Mr. McLamore said.

  “Then when the doors close, they’ll take the train one stop and get back out.”

  “You think I’m kidding, don’t you? I’m not kidding. The pigeons take the train.”

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JANUARY 23, 2001

  PATROLLING THE HOLE

  It is not the most conventional method, but a great way to examine how far the New York City subway has come over the last three decades is to consider the medical records of a man named Brendan J. McGarry.

  To his friends and family, Mr. McGarry is Joe. To everyone else, for most of his adult life, he has been Officer McGarry. Next year will be his 30th patrolling the place he likes to call “the hole.”

  Here, presented chronologically, are a few entries from Officer McGarry’s occupational injury chart: dislocated shoulder, torn cartilage in right knee, hairline skull fracture, fractured right hand, broken nose, broken nose, broken nose.

  The injuries tend to taper off in seriousness and frequency as the years go by, making them a reliable record of not only how violent and chaotic the subway once was, but also how nice and orderly it has been made by comparison.

  To spend an afternoon on the beat with Officer McGarry, 53, in the Times Square station is to understand the true distance between these days and what were probably the subway’s worst days. For the rest of us, this progress has been a very good thing. For Officer McGarry, frankly, it has made life a little dull.

  “You don’t want to say that, really, because people can ride the trains again without being terrified,” he said. “And I’m no glutton for punishment, but back then? Your blood was always pumping.”

  “You walked out of the station,” he said, “you got a collar.”

  But now, even when working undercover in plain clothes, Officer McGarry said he might go a whole day or two without making a collar. And even then, the arrest will usually be a fare beater, a class of criminal that is now central to subway crime-fighting strategy. Back in Officer McGarry’s youth, he said, fare beaters generally did not merit more than a dirty look.