Subwayland Page 8
Later, a man showed up and passed a $5 bill through the slot, asking Mr. James to hold the money for his son. The man’s son came by an hour later and Mr. James, recognizing him, passed along the cash, playing neighborhood banker in addition to token clerk.
It is one of about half a dozen roles he has played most mornings for the last 19 years, all while locked in an underground, fluorescent-lighted, soundproofed, burglar-alarmed box about the size of a small half bath. It is his office and his mess hall. It is his library and his living room. It is where he got a phone call last year telling him that his father had died.
It is also among the most uninviting setups for sociability anywhere in New York City. But, somehow, Mr. James has managed to turn it into a town hall. He has become one of those rare people whom big, anonymous cities sometimes produce: a civil servant so friendly, so ever-present, so clearly enjoying his job that he becomes almost famous for it. (Vacationing in the Bahamas once, he was spotted on the beach by a man who started yelling, “Hey, Mr. Token Booth Man! Mr. Token Booth Man! I know you!”)
As such, Mr. James, 47, has become a kind of symbol in the fight that the Transport Workers Union has been waging against New York City Transit, which has announced plans to reduce staffing and hours at 122 subway token booths citywide, including the permanent closing of 35, to save money.
Can a MetroCard vending machine and a full-body turnstile make sure your teenage daughter gets on the train safely, the union asks? Can they call the police to report a man passed out cold in the bathroom, as Mr. James did yesterday?
Can they serve as confidant and confessor, as part-time police officer, as the Virgil who guides lost pilgrims through the Inferno of the new subway map? (“No, baby, the B doesn’t go there no more.”)
In other words, can the machine beat John Henry?
The answer, of course, is that it cannot. But unfortunately, there are also not many other token clerks out there who can pull off a John Henry quite as exuberantly as Mr. James, a thin, talkative man who wears blue alligator-skin boots and subway-map ties. There are not many clerks, for example, who, at their own expense, decorate their token booths in theme décor every month.
Yesterday it was American flags and fake roses with fake dewdrops for Independence Day. For Kwanzaa, it was kente cloth. For August, the only month for which Mr. James cannot locate a holiday, he does the booth up anyway, in what he calls “summer-fest” colors, green and yellow.
“You must have an atmosphere that makes you feel congenial in what you’re doing,” he says.
And occasionally, the decorations even come in handy, as when he had the booth decked out for Father’s Day with fatherly gift things: belts, ties, pipes, combs. Along came a young subway rider whom Mr. James knew, on his way to a job interview. “But I looked at him and his hair was nappy and his pants were hanging off his rear end and he didn’t have a tie,” he recalled.
“So I gave him a tie and a belt from the booth and I told him to get in the bathroom and comb his hair.
“I said to him, ‘Listen, you’ve got to go down there and sell yourself.’ And you know what? That man got that job.”
Because Mr. James cannot devote such personal attention to everyone, especially when the rush-hour lines begin to lengthen, he likes to inscribe inspirational verses, most of his own invention, on the message board behind him. Yesterday’s were some thoughts on the power of the artist. (“A true artist uses more than one kind of canvas. He is not afraid to experiment or try something new.”)
At the bottom, he had added, “Today is Masterful Monday.”
“What’s tomorrow going to be?” he was asked.
“I’m not sure yet. It could be Tenacious Tuesday or Take-Time-to-Know-Yourself Tuesday.”
“But I know one thing for sure,” he said. “It’s going to be a fabulous Friday.”
—ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JULY 31, 2001
TUBE WALKERS
It has always been strange, walking back and forth across the bottom of the East River in the middle of the night.
“Sometimes,” Frank Ortiz says, “you can hear the tugboats, going by above you.”
The 53rd Street river tunnel, which runs between Manhattan and Queens, seems like something Dante imagined for the Inferno, the place where every sin has a corresponding punishment.
But looking down the river tunnel, it is hard to figure out what the sin might be. It is dark. There are things to slip on, like decomposing rats. Every 10 or 15 minutes, a train thunders through, leaving little room to get out of its way. When the train is gone, there is still the third rail, biding its 600 volts.
And if something really bad happens, the only way out is to run to one end of the tunnel or the other. This means that safety is more than half a mile away, in either direction, if you are in the middle.
“Basically,” said Mr. Ortiz, who has thought about this, “you kiss yourself good-bye.”
He has been a subway track inspector for more than 10 years. His job began to get stranger after the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, when the police realized that an attack in a river tunnel could spread destruction far beyond the subway: It would probably flood a lot of Manhattan, not to mention Brooklyn or Queens.
So in addition to looking for cracks in rails and concrete, which are dangerous enough, Mr. Ortiz and his coworkers were deputized to look for even more dangerous things, like boxes and bags and people who are not supposed to be hanging out at the bottom of the East River.
Now, after the September 11 attack, the tunnel inspectors feel as if the place where they work has become as strategically important as a nuclear missile silo. To get into the river tubes, past the police officers now posted at both ends of all of them, the inspectors must show not only work identification but a driver’s license. A log is also kept by transit officials, so that the police know exactly how many people are in the tubes at all times, and who they are.
Mr. Ortiz and his buddies find this a little funny. “There’s nobody in the innards of the subway except us,” said Chris Fee, a track worker. “Not the cops. Not the firemen. Nobody. We don’t even want to be down there.”
But behind the veneer of humor, even the toughest track workers worry more now about finding something or someone down there with them. River tunnels, buried beneath mud and water, do not seem to be the kind of shining towers of American might that would attract terrorists. But considered another way, they are just horizontal towers. And if they collapsed, it could cripple the city much more effectively than falling skyscrapers have.
Mr. Ortiz and coworkers were talking about this just before dawn the other morning, as the overnight shift ended and they sat in their locker room at Columbus Circle, changing out of their tunnel clothes, thickly powdered with steel dust.
It is the kind of locker room you might expect for guys who work all night in such a lonely place. There is a centerfold of Shannen Doherty, partially clad, on a locker door. There is a faded sign on the wall that reads, “I’m only laughing ’cause you’re my boss.” Mr. Ortiz—whose full first name is Francisco, but who is often called Fidel because of his love for Toro Bravo cigars—explained the nomenclature of the track worker.
Tunnels are not the things that run between regular stations. Those long empty spaces are simply called “the hole.” Tunnels are the things that run under the river, except that these are more often called tubes. In other words, there are no tunnels.
But whatever they are called and as desolate as they may be, Mr. Ortiz and the others are proud that they are their domain. “Those guys are the eyes and ears down there,” said John Samuelsen, the transit union official who represents them. The workers remembered the time in the mid-1990’s when the police were after a suspected rapist in Brooklyn and the man dashed into “the hole.” The track workers led the chase into the darkness, with the police following.
“This is one of the only places in the city where cops and firefighters can’t go on their own,” John Tercovich, a track we
lder, said. “They don’t know where they’re going. And we’re the only ones who know where people could hide.”
This is because the track workers have come across all manner of humanity in the subway over the years. Like the homeless man who liked to sit at a Y in the tracks, in a lawn chair, with a battery-powered light, reading The Wall Street Journal. Or the big one who was sometimes seen wearing white Nike sneakers, a baseball cap and nothing else.
Coming across this man in the middle of the night could make the terrors of terrorism seem relative, the workers said.
“It’s kind of hard down there,” Paul Mondiello, a track worker, said, “to equate what’s more dangerous than what else.”
—ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 20, 2001
THE WATER GUYS
There are all kinds of bad things to worry about in a subway system that never closes. Collisions, derailments, track fires, power failures, crime waves, the size of the rat population and the size of the rats in that population, just to name a few. But there is one danger that riders never seem to consider as they crowd together daily on their way to work: the danger of drowning.
This is not because it is impossible or even outlandish. Look at a subway map and consider how Canal Street got its name. Notice the proximity of many subway lines to huge bodies of water. Understand that most tunnels lie below the water table. Then go dig a moderately deep hole in any of the five boroughs and watch how quickly water seeps in.
The reason few riders ever think about this while in that moderately deep hole called the subway, and why subway seats do not double as flotation devices, is that a small group of underground specialists with rubber hip waders and strong stomachs worry about it for everyone else.
Officially, their department is known as hydraulics, a subdivision of the electromechanical division, which is a subdivision of the maintenance-of-way division. Informally, they are known as the water guys, and as the sign on the grille of one of their trucks will tell you, they like to think of themselves as the “Hydro SWAT Team.”
“It never stops,” says Joe Joyce, who leads the team. He adds, smiling a crooked George S. Patton smile, “And neither do we.”
Their enemy is formidable, unpredictable, destructive and does not smell good at all. Mostly, it is relentless: every day, 13 million gallons of water, enough to fill a medium-size oil tanker, finds its way into the subway. The water guys refer to this, rather casually, as “normal inflow.”
Much of it pours in through sanctioned channels, pipes and ditches and sometimes right between the rails, into 280 pump rooms that dot the system, regurgitating runoff, rain and subterranean rivers out of the subway and into the sewers.
Lots of other water, however, invades covertly, bubbling up through cracks in the floor or seeping down from the ceilings, creating stalactites of gunk that look like fourth-grade science projects.
“Nobody wants to see those stalactite things,” Mr. Joyce said the other day, grimacing.
But he added, with almost religious resignation, “Sometimes, there’s nothing you can do. You never get rid of the water. You just move it around.”
If it were not moved around for just a few days, he said, if all of the pumps and special pump trains and trucks were all shut down at the same time to be serviced, most of the subway would shut down in short order, too. “It would not take long,” he said, “for it to look like an aquarium down there.”
It is a good measure of the kinds of water disasters Mr. Joyce and his crew of 180 workers have faced that after the attack of September 11, when millions of gallons of water poured into the tunnels and nearby buildings, it was only one of the worst floods they had ever seen.
The other day, Mr. Joyce and a maintenance supervisor, John Swist, returned to the 1 and 9 line beneath the World Trade Center site to check on the progress of drying out the collapsed tunnels. About 95 gallons of water a minute still pours onto the tunnel floor, and is pumped back out through a thick yellow hose that snakes four blocks from Vesey to Murray Street.
“Don’t fall in there, because ain’t nobody going to come in and get you out,” Mr. Joyce yelled at Mr. Swist, who had crouched to inspect a waterfall that was pooling into a gray, brackish, ugly lake in the tunnel.
Both men agreed that if September 11 was the worst they had seen, a very close runner-up in their careers was the break of a 30-inch-wide water main that occurred December 3, 1989, near 135th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue in Harlem, flooding tunnels all the way down to 98th Street and submerging stations up to their turnstiles.
“They had to get a guy in scuba gear to go down in there to shut the thing off,” Mr. Swist remembered.
While the water guys love to talk about their glorious battles, they acknowledge that the war against water is mostly one of attrition, of doing things other people would not want to do. Like working with the rats. “Guy not too long ago, a rat jumped on his back and he got so freaked out he fell over backwards and hurt himself, bad,” Mr. Joyce said. “He’s out on disability now.”
The day-to-day job is about clearing potato chip bags from the drain covers and digging soda bottles out of pipes, to make sure that water can reach the sumps where the pumps are. And about once a year, it is about putting on rubber boots, climbing down beneath the tracks and “mucking” all the collected silt from the sumps to make sure the pumps can work.
“What does it smell like down there?” Mr. Joyce said. “Let’s just say it’s a smell you do not forget.”
—ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 20, 2001
THE SHUTTLE LADY
The London Underground features a soft, elegant recorded voice that reminds passengers stepping into trains to “mind the gap.”
The New York subway features a woman named Millie Mendez who minds the gap for you—whether you want her to or not. That is her job. And her voice is neither recorded, soft nor elegant.
“The gap! The gap!” she cries, the sound carrying like a car alarm. “Be careful or you’re going to fall in!”
Ms. Mendez is a platform conductor in charge of one the busiest places in the subway, the Times Square–Grand Central shuttle, on the Times Square end. But there are many platform conductors in many busy places, and so her job description does little to convey what she really does.
Every weekday, 100,000 people ride the shuttle. From about 7 a.m. to 2 p.m., Ms. Mendez’s shift, she sees probably 30,000 of those riders, scrambling past her to squeeze into the cars. And while they are within her ambit, almost all 30,000 of them scramble and squeeze in a slightly more civilized manner because Millie Mendez demands it.
She does not carry a gun, a nightstick or a ticket book. In fact, she has very little real power other than the authority to hold trains, summon the police or induce shame.
What Ms. Mendez does have, however, is a voice.
In timbre and volume, it most closely approximates a portable air horn of the type heard at baseball games.
In authority, it ranks with the homeroom teacher no one ever crossed.
In style—her pronunciation of shuttle is a grand, elongated “SHHUUUAAAAAATTLE!”—it is solidly in the urban tradition of newsboys, ringside announcers and people who yell out of high windows.
Ms. Mendez takes no offense at such descriptions. “I was born with this,” she says, pointing at her throat. “They tell me I’m the Ethel Merman of the subways.”
Before accepting this role, she had worked in the subways for 13 years, starting as a cleaning worker and working her way up to train driver. But on a very bad day several years ago at the Astor Place station on the No. 6 line, she became closely acquainted with the two numbers no one driving a train ever wants to hear: 12-9, radio code for a man under a train, in this case a homeless man who leaped in front of her train just as she pulled into the station.
She never managed to return to driving. “It was just too hard to think about,” she explained.
When she got the temporary assignment at Times Square two years ago, it seeme
d like any other. But then something happened: Unlike other lines, shuttle trains are short, as are the platforms. Its riders are mostly regulars. And because of this, Ms. Mendez quickly found herself on a kind of stage, the kind she did not know she had been waiting for all of her life.
She began to sing out. She began to work the crowd. She began to work up a regular routine, with lines like “Your chariot awaits you!” and “Good morning! Please, don’t all talk at once!” delivered to platoons of sullen, sleepy-eyed riders streaming past.
When people do not move into the middle of the trains to her satisfaction, she boards the car herself to show them how. “I’m getting in,” she warns. “And I am not a size 10. I am a 24-plus-plus.” When someone blocks a door, she says, in a sinister tone, “Please, step away from the door,” as if the person had just dropped a pistol.
She does these things every day, regardless of whether there is a reporter following her around. Even when there is, she seems relatively unconcerned. After being introduced to this one, she called him Keith one day and Kenny the next. “Well,” she said. “It’s close, right?”
Later, she offered him a breath mint. “You need it, honey,” she said.
Herman Angel, Ms. Mendez’s supervisor, said that when her schedule shifted several months ago and she was transferred to another station, her fans began to complain and letters started arriving at New York City Transit’s headquarters, demanding her return.
“She’s got, I think, 18 letters of commendation from people in her file,” Mr. Angel said. “I’ve been here 11 years. I think I’ve got maybe one letter. You know how much trouble it is to write a letter?”
In short order, he said, Ms. Mendez was back at the shuttle, where she is likely to remain as long as her voice holds out.
“A few people,” he added, “they don’t like her because they say she’s too loud. They’re like, ‘Does she have to talk so loud all the time?’” But those people are probably like the man last Friday morning who crowded near the door of a shuttle train, cutting right in front of 15 people who had dutifully lined up at Ms. Mendez’s request.