It was two years after Ronald Reagan had assumed office and declared “Morning in America.” One of the government’s policies was to release mental patients so they could experience the sunrise firsthand. Cutbacks in social programs flooded the streets with people who were psychiatrically challenged and/or suffering from substance abuse. New York City and especially its public facilities were awash with street people, some with hospital bracelets still visible on their wrists. They were panhandling, muttering to themselves, or just camping out, having set up makeshift open-air studio apartments in vacant lots, parks, church vestibules, empty doorways, atop sidewalk grates, under highway exit ramps, and along the East River seawall and the Hudson River’s crumbling piers. A prominent feature of these corrugated cardboard hovels was the “I ♥ NY” plastic shopping bag. As it happened, in the city’s darkest days a tourism campaign had been launched with this upbeat logo in black letters embracing a bright red heart on a stark white background. In no time, these bags became ubiquitous as the de
rigueur luggage of the homeless, and the must-get tourist photo was the raggedy jangling street person in heavily layered clothing pushing a stolen shopping cart that acted as a portable closet, or asleep in a vestibule, clutching the prominently displayed I ♥ NY bag. Perhaps the better slogan would’ve been “NY: We’ll Pick Your Pocket and Steal Your Heart.”
Another bit of local color at bus and train stations, street corners, and parks were groups of young people with radiator-size boom boxes break dancing on giant slabs of cardboard. Tourists and commuters with a few minutes until their bus or train departed gathered to watch while an opportunistic pickpocket unrelated to the group worked the crowd. It was impossible not to notice how talented these kids were – hopping, popping, locking, freezing, sliding, and spinning on their heads. This was a far cry from the hokey pokey, chicken dance, and beer barrel polka of my Western New York youth. Hip-hop, with its fast, rhythmic beat and self-expressive stream-of-consciousness rhymes, was rising from the ashes of the South Bronx on its way to taking over the music business and becoming a giant cash cow. I can only hope those gifted performers went along for the ride. One Shawn Carter progressed from dealing drugs in a Brooklyn housing project to captain of the rap industry under the more familiar name Jay Z.
In front of the major transportation centers, a scruffy legion of self-appointed baggage handlers and taxi hailers battled to grab your stuff, shove everything into a cab, and extort a fee. Tourists were unacquainted with the improvisational nature of the system and were pounced upon so swiftly that most had no choice but to go with the flow and produce some change or a dollar bill. Nowadays, when I see professional taxi stands staffed by uniformed workers, I’m reminded that they were forged through brutal entrepreneurship, more than a few robberies, and some inappropriate touching.
Between the problems of the nation and a personal budget gap, I was unable to afford a New York apartment and would need to accept an offer from one of the pimps lurking in Port Authority alcoves to snare runaway girls, or freeload off my retired eighty-one-year-old grandfather in Huntington on Long Island. My silver moon boots,
purple snorkel jacket with neon-orange lining, and cap with the piglet earflaps didn’t seem to say “working girl” so much as “girl in need of work,” and so off to Long Island I went.
Chapter 3
A Hole in the Ground
I’m always stunned to arrive in another city and discover actual upholstery making the public transportation system more homey and comfortable. Instead of being jealous, I humbly accept that we New Yorkers can’t be trusted with anything but molded plastic. You get the subway you deserve.
The first underground subway opened in 1904, almost thirty-five years after the first elevated train line started transporting New Yorkers up and down the West Side between Lower Manhattan and the Bronx. In 1938, when my father was seven, he could ride the subway from his apartment building in Washington Heights to the Museum of Natural History on Central Park West or Professor Heckler’s Flea Circus on West 42nd Street. In Times Square he’d watch comedies starring Charlie Chaplin and westerns featuring Big Boy Williams. The fare was a nickel, a double feature also cost a nickel, and so did a Hershey’s bar, as he never failed to remind me during the runaway inflation of the 1970s. No one thought for a moment he was taking his life in his hands by riding the subway alone, nor did the police bring my grandmother in for questioning.
Dad also regularly rode the elevated railway (“the El”), which loomed above Third Avenue. This monstrosity of rusting girders, columns, tracks, and railings blocked out great patches of sunlight on the pavement below and made real estate much less desirable than that situated a block away on Lexington Avenue. Dad said the trains were noisy,
grimy, and shaky like a bad amusement park ride, but the good thing was if you forgot to bring a book it was fun to look into the windows of all the people going about their domestic routines. He liked to imagine himself as Dashiell Hammett’s private detective Nick Charles working a case while starring in a radio drama.
The El was demolished (most would say thankfully) in 1955 before Dad had a chance to conclusively solve any crimes, but can still be experienced in all its eyesore glory in dozens of old movies such as The Lost Weekend and On the Bowery. The only advice Dad gave me upon announcing that I was leaving for the big, bad city was not to fall asleep on the subway because someone would steal my shoes.
When I arrived in Manhattan a token cost 75 cents. So did a slice of pizza. Oddly, the cost of pizza slices and tokens basically rose in tandem for more than a half century, and this law of economics became known as the “Pizza Principle.” It was also called “The New York Pizza Connection,” which sounds more like a mozzarella laundering operation, but actually has nothing to do with the gang that distributed more than $1 billion of heroin that was smuggled through local pizza parlors and resulted in the 1985 “Pizza Connection Trial.” However, while the price of a subway ride has skyrocketed to $2.75, a round of vicious price wars has recently put the $1 slice back on the menu in pizza parlor–heavy areas. No one complains about oil prices in New York, just the cost of subway, bus, and cab fares; tolls for bridges and tunnels; and of course that perennial mainstay, the pizza slice. In Spike Lee’s movie Do the Right Thing the trouble starts when a pizza parlor customer grumbles about the price of his slice.
By 1983 the entire subway system had been reduced to a labyrinth of subterranean urinals connected by tunnels, and was the preferred operating ground for recently released felons, parole violators, addled veterans, sexual deviants, and homeless people.
Whereas in most cities winter is followed by spring, here signs informed me that it was “Chain Snatching Season” and warned, “Please don’t flash a lot of jewelry. Tuck in your chains. Don’t flash your bracelets and watches. Turn your rings around so the stones don’t show. There are only 3,400 transit police. They can’t be everywhere, all the
time. If you want to keep it, don’t flaunt it.” Good to know, thanks. Happy spring to you too.
Stairwells, platforms, token booths, and cars were festooned with graffiti inside and out and from top to bottom including windows, doors, ceilings, floors, rooftops, and route maps. In many ways the spray-painted balloon letters, cartoon figures, and mysterious swirls were a joyous relief to the grimy drabness of a blighted soul-crushing landscape, with this vibrant art filling a void, both situational and spiritual. The platforms had no clocks and took on the surreal timelessness of a coal mine or casino. A sensible design choice, since why would New Yorkers hurrying to catch the subway to work or school in the morning with hands full of bags, briefcases, umbrellas, and lattes need to look at the time anyway?
Light sockets went unfilled in cars, stairwells, and platforms, thereby casting long, dark shadows and creating the perfect ambience for a 3-D horror film. The cars themselves were essentially dumpsters on wheels, every surface sticky from spilled soft drinks and who knew what else. Accidentally touch the bo
ttom of a seat and discover a warehouse of previously enjoyed gum. New subway cars went into service (no wonder our economy was so bad if it was cheaper to have these manufactured in Japan and delivered halfway around the world), but within weeks they looked as apocalyptic as the old ones. The only distinguishing factor was that the new cars had seats with molded plastic indentations for buttocks, only they’d apparently used the standard Asian buttocks as a guide. The more ample American backside needed at least one and a quarter spaces, if not more, so this made seating awkward, in addition to making an entire city already suffering from low self-esteem feel officially fat.
Trash, spilled food, and unconscious people covered the car interiors as well as the stations. In summertime the windows remained open if they weren’t broken or else jammed shut, and garbage shrapnel would fly into your eyes like a scene out of Dickensian London. The poorly lit platforms were moldy dungeons where paying riders were regularly assaulted, robbed, panhandled, and generally abused. The whole enterprise looked and smelled like defeat.
time. If you want to keep it, don’t flaunt it.” Good to know, thanks. Happy spring to you too.
Stairwells, platforms, token booths, and cars were festooned with graffiti inside and out and from top to bottom including windows, doors, ceilings, floors, rooftops, and route maps. In many ways the spray-painted balloon letters, cartoon figures, and mysterious swirls were a joyous relief to the grimy drabness of a blighted soul-crushing landscape, with this vibrant art filling a void, both situational and spiritual. The platforms had no clocks and took on the surreal timelessness of a coal mine or casino. A sensible design choice, since why would New Yorkers hurrying to catch the subway to work or school in the morning with hands full of bags, briefcases, umbrellas, and lattes need to look at the time anyway?
Light sockets went unfilled in cars, stairwells, and platforms, thereby casting long, dark shadows and creating the perfect ambience for a 3-D horror film. The cars themselves were essentially dumpsters on wheels, every surface sticky from spilled soft drinks and who knew what else. Accidentally touch the bottom of a seat and discover a warehouse of previously enjoyed gum. New subway cars went into service (no wonder our economy was so bad if it was cheaper to have these manufactured in Japan and delivered halfway around the world), but within weeks they looked as apocalyptic as the old ones. The only distinguishing factor was that the new cars had seats with molded plastic indentations for buttocks, only they’d apparently used the standard Asian buttocks as a guide. The more ample American backside needed at least one and a quarter spaces, if not more, so this made seating awkward, in addition to making an entire city already suffering from low self-esteem feel officially fat.
Trash, spilled food, and unconscious people covered the car interiors as well as the stations. In summertime the windows remained open if they weren’t broken or else jammed shut, and garbage shrapnel would fly into your eyes like a scene out of Dickensian London. The poorly lit platforms were moldy dungeons where paying riders were regularly assaulted, robbed, panhandled, and generally abused. The whole enterprise looked and smelled like defeat.
When straphanger Bernard Goetz shot some young men he thought were going to mug him and seriously wounded all four, he was found not guilty of all charges except the illegal possession of a firearm, for which he served two-thirds of a one-year sentence. The slender, bespectacled Goetz was swiftly dubbed the Subway Vigilante, and his case helped the NRA make it easier to carry a concealed weapon. Depending on your point of view, this either caused traveling underground to become more dangerous because everyone was carrying a gun, or else much safer because people took into account the fact that everybody was carrying a gun.
There were also “token suckers” who jammed the slots with gum wrappers and then skulked nearby. When potential riders inserted their tokens into turnstiles, they got stuck and had to go complain or try another turnstile. That’s when the sucker swiftly appeared out of the gloom like a vampire to lean over and remove the token with a big inhale of breath, commonly known as “the kiss of desperation” and “the most disgusting nonviolent subway crime.”
One apprehended token sucker struck back at repulsed onlookers by saying he’d kissed women way worse than a token slot. Sometimes a guy would jam all the token slots and then stand by the gate and let people pass at a discounted rate. They considered themselves to be “small businessmen” and “self-starters,” while passengers referred to them as “train trolls.” It comes as no surprise that the people most disgruntled by this last ploy were the fare cheaters intent on using token slugs to begin with. For the rest of us, after riding the subway on the cheap there was a good chance of getting a half-price newspaper from some guy who’d emptied a vendor box on the street and was hawking them at the top of the stairs.
Having grown up in a predominantly Catholic neighborhood, I was no stranger to overcrowding. Before seatbelts and lifeguards there was always room for one more kid on the bus or in the pool. In fact, climbing into the station wagon with my friend Mary and her eight siblings was not unlike boarding a pirate ship. And when squeezing us all into the frame for a class photo our Catholic teachers liked to say, “Leave no gaps for the Devil!”
Still, while waiting on a packed subway platform you had to worry about being accidentally or purposely pushed onto the tracks. Forget corporate retreats where your team navigates a mud pit, the subway commute remains a daily trust exercise involving more than 4 million riders you don’t know and your mother hasn’t met to decide if they’d be a good or bad influence on you.
Down below on the tracks lies the dreaded third rail, which, if so much as touched, will electrocute a person with a quick 625 volts. And yet here were these enormous rats blithely crawling across it, basically in paradise since there were rarely any trash cans on the platforms, leaving riders little choice but to toss their garbage onto the tracks. As for electrocution: It transpires that when the rodents hop on and off the third rail they never touch it and the trackbed simultaneously, therefore not serving as grounding posts the way human limbs would. To see the third rail in action watch MTA inspector Walter Matthau corner subway hijacker Robert Shaw in my dad’s favorite movie, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.
At the stations I could see restrooms that had been boarded up years ago as crime scenes or potential crime scenes. Meantime, the ones inside Pennsylvania Station not only hadn’t seen a janitor’s mop in decades, but were overrun with muggers and live-ins who most likely received their letters from the parole board there. In any case, the complete lack of usable facilities put an extra bounce into everyone’s step. Public transportation had become the perfect training ground for New York’s number one sport – Extreme Bladder Control.
Still, there was a way to perform the daily ballet between human and machine properly if you knew some basic physics. It’s necessary to calculate the area of the entire subway car and make sure your body divides the region equally so you’re not closer to any one person than another. Every time passengers get on or off the train, the entire corpus distribution must be recalculated. These frequent remixes cause the aggravated conductor to bark, let ’em out, let ’em out! If a bus or subway car is almost empty and you sit next to another passenger, this is considered an invasion of personal space and punishable by a glare, grope, or felony. Same with standing in elevators. For those who
always groaned, “Why do we need algebra?” the obvious answer is, “For when there’s an uneven number of people in any given space!” However, during rush hour, when commuters are packed so tightly that they can feel the keys in other riders’ pockets, such close proximity is perfectly acceptable. Whereas some urbanites live cheek by jowl, New Yorkers live face-in-armpit. It just so happens that playing musical chairs as a child is excellent training for getting a seat on the subway.
Identifying the battle-scarred straphangers was a cinch. They folded their newspaper in quarters lengthwise so it could be held in one hand and scrolled while standing up, and they
huddled in stairwells to determine whether an express or local train was arriving next, ready to bolt up or down. They could tell where the doors were going to open on the platform and surmise by how other passengers were dressed who was planning to get off at 42nd Street (fancy types catching trains to Connecticut), thereby making a seat available. The person pushing through the short-tempered masses in the wrong direction, known as a “subway salmon,” was no member of their hardcore rank. The pros knew that if you saw a completely empty car on an otherwise packed train you weren’t the luckiest or most observant rider in New York, but that it was July and the AC wasn’t working, or else slumped inside was a person who’d lost all control over their personal hygiene.
Native New Yorkers know that escalators have a slow lane on the right for standing or walking and an express lane on the left for sprinting or leaping, and heaven forbid you’re in the wrong one. An irate man trying to race up the left-hand side of an escalator underneath the Port Authority but was blocked by two idlers turned to me and said, “Do you believe this!” It was midday and the offenders were clearly visitors. They hadn’t a clue that they were wholly responsible for incapacitating a city of 8 million. He glanced at his watch and said, “If I didn’t have fifteen minutes to catch my bus I’d be shouting at them.”
One quickly became proficient in all things subway because it was strictly an observation game. Signs stating what train was going where, when they existed, could be counted on to be wrong. The announcements were unintelligible. More than once I was asked by American tourists what language was being used for the subway broadcasts.
Life in New York Page 2
