Subwayland (15 page)

One regular user of the station, George Moore, an accountant, pointed with disgust to a place where he said he had seen a pile of feces on the platform the day before. He seemed almost dejected that the evidence was missing. “Well, I guess somebody cleaned it up,” he said.

But another rider, Jacqueline Chapman, said she had never seen a cleaner at work in the station. “Just the rats picking up stuff,” she said, smiling sadly.

This quickly turned out to be no exaggeration—and, in the end, the most convincing argument that Chambers Street is without a doubt the ugliest station.

At the south end of the uptown platform a field of rotting debris stretched for several feet, studded with several full plastic trash bags. As a reporter and photographer watched, one of the black trash bags began to undulate wildly and, over the course of several minutes, as many as a half-dozen rats scurried away from a hole in the top, disappearing into the tunnel darkness.

A bleary-eyed man standing nearby shrugged, and then leaned over the platform to make friendly, squeaky sounds to the rats below. “Just rats,” he said.

“You raise the fare to $10, you can't get rid of rats.”

—ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED MAY 13, 2003

THE FISH TRAIN

Officially, of course, it will always be the B train.

But just take it on any given Sunday evening, along about half of its southerly course, and you might agree that it would not be much of an exaggeration to give this subway line a subtitle: the Fish Train.

Ramon Vasquez, a hotel maintenance worker, was aboard the train one Sunday. “Whoa, man,” he said, making a face. “It smells like fish in here.”

Mr. Vasquez was on his way home to Brooklyn when a bracing aroma boarded the B train at the Grand Street station in Chinatown. It got on along with about 20 Chinese-American Brooklynites, each carrying two armfuls of diaphanous, bright orange plastic bags bulging with all manner of food—sweet-potato leaves, flowering chives, slender purple eggplant, brown litchi—but, first and foremost, with fish.

Jin Hua Chung, a 60-year-old steam-press operator, was among the fish buyers. He moved to Bensonhurst from Chinatown five years ago, but he still buys his fish only on Mott Street. “Why?” he said. “Because I like fresh, that's why, and only Chinatown gives me fresh.” As he spoke, a good-size tilapia, which had been yanked live from a fish market tank only a couple of minutes before, poked its head from one of one of his orange plastic bags. (He and his wife share kitchen duties, he says but adds, “I am the better cook.”)

The Sunday subway fish migration has been growing for a long time now, as Chinese immigrants have fanned out in greater numbers from Manhattan to Brooklyn neighborhoods and yet seem to return en masse to Manhattan on weekends to do all their shopping for the week's meals.

The migration can be seen to some degree on a number of trains that serve other Chinatowns—the N and R to Brooklyn; the 6 train from Canal Street to Grand Central, where the fish make their transfer to the 7 and back to Flushing. But the phenomenon is at its most concentrated, and pungent, aboard the B train, which provides the fastest way to get from Chinatown to Sunset Park, the largest Chinese-American enclave in Brooklyn.

On a nice, late-spring Sunday, it can seem as if thousands of pounds of fish are making their way to Brooklyn along the B, bag by plastic bag, tucked beneath the feet of thousands of riders, bound for thousands of steamers and soup pots.

Among the exporters on Sunday was a 35-year-old man named Wu,waiting by the turnstiles for his wife, who does all the fish shopping for their family. (He is in charge of vegetables.) There was Ying Hsu, a law student, and her boyfriend, Dan Goldschmidt, a lawyer, who had found what they needed and were bound for Brooklyn. “I just got salmon,” reported Ms. Hsu, almost sheepishly. “A very generic American fish.”

There was Lisa Mui, an unemployed bartender from Sheepshead Bay who had accompanied her mother on a grocery run. “I love the scene,” said Ms. Mui, who had elaborate fingernails and a pierced tongue. “I do love the scene. But to be honest, it's really all about the food.” (Later, asked whether the chicken they bought in Chinatown tasted better than supermarket chicken, she rolled her eyes and glanced at her mother, and said, “As long as it doesn't talk to me when I eat it, it's fine by me.”)

The contest for most popular whole fish that Sunday seemed to be a dead heat between striped bass and tilapia, a type of African lake fish that is now widely farmed around the world and has become a staple in many Chinese homes. (Tilapia is said to have been the fish that Jesus multiplied along with the loaves to feed the multitudes.)

The contest for most popular shade of plastic shopping bag was not even close: deep jack-o'-lantern orange, which has become a kind of calling card of Chinatown groceries and fishmongers. Bright red ran a distant second and pink third.

Why orange? “Orange is a lucky color,” said Kenny Tran, a manager at the Tan My My Market, on the corner of Chrystie Street and Grand, close enough to the subway entrance to hit with a scallop. “Black looks horrible,” he said. “And white? You know why people don't use white? Because white is always for the dead.”

While Sunday's fish migration seemed festive enough—one man was seen lugging home a case of Budweiser along with his catch—there was a lot of noticeable mourning going on, too, because by the end of the summer, the Fish Train will be no more, at least for a while.

Repairs to the Manhattan Bridge will mean that the B will not run to Grand Street, and the station will be nearly shut down for more than two years. The fish will still make their way to Brooklyn, of course, but probably in smaller schools, on different trains. It might even be difficult to smell which ones.

Mr. Chung, for one, is not happy. “They say this is a developed country?” he said. “If they knew this bridge was going to have so many problems, why couldn't they have built another one?”

—ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JUNE 19, 2001

4

CUSTOMS, COURTING RITUALS, CEREMONIES, AND HIGH CULTURE

Life in the subway: People have been born there. People have died there. Sometimes, people fall in love there.

 

 

READING BETWEEN THE RAILS

There are those who spend their days and nights on the subway because it is more pleasant and less dangerous than where they live, others because it
is
where they live. And there are also those who ride it because it comes with a captive audience, making it a highly effective place to sing songs, sell batteries and save souls.

But New Yorkers also use the subway for another purpose that goes woefully underappreciated: as a reading room. It is certainly nothing new. It has been going on since long before Arthur Miller eased his commute by reading “The Brothers Karamazov”—that “great book of wonder” as he called it—and decided that he was born to be a writer.

But there is some evidence, all of it thoroughly anecdotal, that the subway's use as rolling urban library has expanded over the last several years, in direct proportion to the health of the economy. The theory goes something like this: The good economy makes people happy, but it also makes them work longer hours. Which means they spend their hard-earned money enjoying themselves later into the evening. Which means they have much less time to read books anywhere else except in the only place where their cell phones don't work and no one is likely to know them or talk to them.

Many subway riders, like David Gassawy, a 29-year-old art teacher, see their commute as the best uninterrupted reading time remaining in their lives, one not to be squandered on newspapers or magazines.

Spending a long morning watching people read on the subway, one can learn a few general principles about the practice. Mr. Gassawy expounded the first one yesterday: fiction is superior subway reading. “Nonfiction is more work—it's harder to do it on the subway,” he said. “Maybe it's something about following a narrative in fiction.” (Mr. Gassawy was on a southbound A train, reading something called “The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts,” by Louis De Bernieres, a novel in which one character builds a Disneyland in the Andes called Incarama.)

Another general guideline is that people tend to have their subway books and then they have the books they are reading elsewhere. Rarely do the two libraries mingle.

Michelle Mills, a 25-year-old design student, well into Book Two of “The Lord of the Rings,” by J. R. R. Tolkien, said, “If I'm really,
really
into a book then I might keep reading it at home to finish it.” But mostly, she puts away her subway book as she steps out of the train doors and yearns for a longer commute, something other reading riders admitted to yesterday. “If your ride is too short,” Ms. Mills explained, “then you keep losing the story every day.”

There is, finally, a widespread phenomenon that might be classified as subway book bashfulness. It happens when people who usually read Kierkegaard at home read King (as in Stephen) on the subway, and become so self-conscious that they fold the title page back or hold the front of the book firmly down in their laps. It also happens in reverse, when readers like Mr. Gassawy get the urge to read something as chewy and highbrow as “The Society of the Spectacle,” by the French theorist Guy Debord. “I covered it up with a paper jacket,” he admitted. “I had to. I just felt too pretentious holding that up in the subway.”

Of course, some readers are much too into their prose to worry about etiquette. Brad Audett, working on his master's degree at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, was concentrating yesterday on “Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us,” by Robert D. Hare. Some fellow riders were staring.

“I read a lot of books about serial killers,” he said. “It's what I'm studying at school.”

“I don't really notice, but I guess it does freak some people out.”

—ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 7, 2000

LEG-SPREADERS

Gillian Costello is a lawyer. Proof is important to her. So yesterday, to show a reporter something on the subway, she conducted a simple empirical demonstration.

Ms. Costello had absolutely no doubt about the outcome of her experiment, because she tests this particular hypothesis twice every workday. As do most women in New York, whenever they manage to get a seat on a crowded train. The hypothesis: Men take up a lot more room on the subway than women. They stretch out. They lean. They do the Ward Cleaver ankle-on-knee leg cross. But mostly, and most damnably, they tend to sit with their legs splayed out like catchers behind home plate.

And sitting next to them will invariably be a woman like Ms. Costello—knees clamped together, shoulders hunched, bag on lap and newspaper folded into a thin column, hiding a face with the pained expression peculiar to someone who is being touched by a total stranger over a long period of time.

Her demonstration began yesterday morning at 9:30 at the Bergen Street station in Brooklyn, where Ms. Costello, 35, catches the No. 2 train every morning. Crowding in the cars was light, and Ms. Costello got lucky, wedged in between a woman and what seemed to be an anomalous man, his feet only shoulder-width apart.

But before the train had gone two stops, she spotted several grievous examples of the transgression. “Look at that guy,” she said, pointing toward a small man wearing a backpack the size of a compact car. The man sat down with the backpack still on, ramming it into several people. And then, as if he had not made his presence sufficiently felt, he butterflied his knees into the passengers on both sides.

Ms. Costello shook her head. “He's guilty of several offenses,” she said.

Next was the very, very big guy down the bench with the black beret and the flowing beard who was not only spread-eagled but sound asleep and swaying from side to side like a boxer in the 15th round.

Then there was the young guy sitting on a two-person bench at the end of the car. His elbows were on his knees and his knees were spread out so far that no one even tried to sit next to him.

“That's not just invading space,” Ms. Costello said, framing her arguments carefully, as if for a judge. “That's foreclosing on it altogether.”

When the topic of the Encroaching Male is raised among women at her law firm or at a party, Ms. Costello says, it becomes a kind of rallying cry. It ranks high on the list of subway irritants, up there with people who stand in the door, people who push into the train before letting others off and people who lean their entire bodies against the poles (making it impossible for anyone else to use them to hang on).

But these other offenses sometimes cross gender lines. Space invasion, on the other hand, tends to be one in which women are almost without sin and so they can cast imaginary stones—right into the crotches of their offenders.