Subwayland (25 page)

The doors closed and he sped south. He pulled into the Cortlandt Street stop and brought the train to a halt at exactly 8:48, just as the first jet slammed into the north tower. But he still had no idea of the role he was playing in that day's events, taking one of the last trains through what would later be known as ground zero.

“People who had gotten out of the train started running back down the stairs,” he recalled last Saturday, resting in Harlem after returning to work on another line. “And there were other people still trying to get up the stairs. I saw people get knocked down. “And I heard someone say: ‘They're shooting upstairs! They're shooting! Someone has a gun!'”

In the list of dangerous things that Mr. Johnson has thought about encountering on his train, even a gunman seemed on the outer edge of possibility until that day. “You never imagine worse things. You worry about a derailment. Maybe a bomb in the train, but the odds of that seem so long. And so when I heard someone say that there was shooting upstairs, it seemed like a huge thing. I don't panic, but I said to my partner, the conductor, ‘Let's get this train out of here.'”

He said he envisioned the gunfight spilling down onto his train. As he said this, he smiled and shook his head. “If I had only known what was really going on right over my head,” he said. “I didn't hear anything. I didn't feel anything. The lights didn't even flicker.”

He took his train downtown to the South Ferry station, where he finally got a supervisor on his radio and heard that it was not gunfire, but some kind of explosion. He still did not know whether to believe it. Rumors and confusion, he knew, travel down the tracks much faster than the trains.

The strangest thing he remembers now is that as he headed north again, taking his train back toward the burning tower just as another plane was minutes away from hitting the other tower, he saw no pandemonium. In fact, he picked up only a few people beneath the World Trade Center, and no one on the platform appeared panicked anymore.

“I guess it's kind of like the eye of the storm,” he said. “It was almost peaceful.” Mr. Johnson left the tunnels and stations behind him, heading north. And only five minutes after he pulled back into his terminal and ran to find out what had happened, he watched on television as the first tower collapsed. Then he heard word on the radio that the tunnels, like the towers, had fallen in.

“That's when it hit me,” he said. “That's when it finally dawned on me that I was right in the middle of it. And right then and there, I said a prayer for all of those people I saw going up the stairs that day at Cortlandt Street. I hope every one of them made it out.”

—ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 18, 2001

HEAVY LIFT

When the words “rescue and recovery” are heard, the people who run and repair the 722 miles of the New York City subway are not the first to come to mind.

In fact, in the encomiums that have been sung about firefighters and police officers, National Guardsmen and teamsters since the work of sifting through the Trade Center wreckage began, subway workers have figured in hardly at all. Mets have not been spotted wearing New York City Transit caps during their games. And if you asked someone at a turnstile, chances are he would guess that during the last two weeks subway workers did exactly what they have always done: they made the subway run again, a miracle in itself.

They did that, of course, and, unlike firefighters and police officers, they do not grieve for missing coworkers. But consider these questions: What other group of city workers is responsible every day for knowing what to do with tons of concrete and thousands of iron beams? What other group regularly battles water that threatens to swallow up subterranean New York? Who else, unfortunately, has had years of experience with mangled wreckage and looming collapse?

Finally, who else would have been able to assemble, within a couple of hours of the two towers falling on September 11, a five-block-long convoy of every conceivable piece of heavy machinery needed for the task, from metal saws to backhoes to loaders to dump trucks to cranes?

That Tuesday, the armies of rescue workers who swarmed over the mountains of debris learned the answers to those questions quickly, as thousands of transit workers joined them in Lower Manhattan, converging from around the city and doing some of the heaviest lifting and most dangerous work in the first days.

At the same time, the transit workers—men like José DeJesus, who usually replaces subway tracks, and Daniel Ramlal, who mans a blowtorch—learned many things themselves that they did not want to know and still have trouble talking about.

They learned, within hours, for example, that there are different types of search-and-rescue dogs.

“We'd be up there, burning through metal and pulling beams away, and the dogs would start to go crazy,” said Joseph Caiozzo, an assistant chief in the track division. “And you were just sure that they had found somebody. You wanted to find somebody so bad. And then a fire chief tells you that those dogs are just trained to find cadavers. Not live people.”

They learned when to look away. And they learned to lower their expectations.

“Some places, it was so discouraging because you dig for three days and you don't find a desk, a shoe, a lamp, nothing,” said Mr. Ramlal, who worked balanced on high debris piles, cutting through snapped I beams that took three quarters of an hour to sever with a blowtorch. “Not any sign of human life. All we saw was twisted steel. It was just like everybody had disappeared.”

When he found a tiny, almost unrecognizable doll, he jumped down to pick it up, as if it were evidence of life on another planet. “I wouldn't let it go,” he said. “I thought it had to mean somebody was down there.”

By early Friday, September 14, as the rescue effort began to become regimented, the subway workers learned something else: that they would be replaced and that they would somehow have to find a way to reconcile themselves to their regular jobs again. It did not happen easily.

“You had to tell the guys, ‘If you are not off your equipment and back at the staging area within two minutes after the whistle is blown, you are off the job,'” one supervisor said. “You had to threaten. Nobody wanted to leave.”

Mr. DeJesus, a wide-shouldered man who looks as if he would normally be the life of any party, cannot talk about it without his voice breaking. He was atop a payloader, scooping up matchsticks of metal that still bore the original markings to show how far above the earth they had been suspended just hours before: “87th Fl.”

“I'm just 31,” he said the other day, trying to concentrate on his track job again. “I'm too young to have anything else to compare this to.”

Other men who sat around talking about it last week in downtown Brooklyn were older. They had been in Vietnam. They had been among the first to venture into Union Square station in 1991, after a horrific train wreck killed five people. They had been there to pump the water out of the crater in the basement of the World Trade Center after it was bombed in 1993, killing six people.

But they, too, had nothing to compare this with. “I was away working for so long,” said Arthur Bethell, a white-haired supervisor in the subway infrastructure department. “And I heard that my 5-year-old granddaughter was asking, ‘Where is Papa?' All I could think of was all those other kids asking that about parents they would never see again.”

—ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 25, 2001

BACK ON BOARD

Like many others, Edward R. Levitt cannot live his life the way he used to anymore.

He used to live in Battery Park City, but that is like an armed camp. He used to work at the New York Coffee, Sugar and Cocoa Exchange at 4 World Trade Center, but that is a smoking pyre of scrap metal.

Finally, Mr. Levitt used to motor into Manhattan, every Monday morning, from his weekend home on Long Island in his shiny, V-6, 200-horsepower Chrysler Sebring convertible.

Yesterday morning was different. He came in from Northport, N.Y., where he is living until he can get back into his apartment. He punched in at his new office, a converted warehouse in Queens where traders are so cramped they must work in shifts. And to get there he took a strange, new kind of car, one he has not taken regularly in years: a subway car.

To be exact, a rusty old Redbird, on the No. 7 line that rumbles above the park-and-ride lot near Shea Stadium.

Judging by the number of cars parked there alongside his, he was not the only car lover who has been so ground down by gridlock, so riddled with restrictions and so entreated to take the train in the weeks since the World Trade Center attacks that he has finally been extracted from behind the wheel.

It is not exactly an act of civic cooperation on his part. It is not about heeding the mayor's pleas. It is about sanity. “They've got about 100 parking spaces for somewhere between 500 and 1,000 people,” said Mr. Levitt, 60, a sleep-deprived sugar trader who sometimes dabbles in coffee. (He looked as if he needed some.) “And last Tuesday, trying to drive, it was so bad I just told myself, ‘This is crazy. You can't do this anymore.'”

So last week, he parked and bought a MetroCard. He is on his second one. “Do they still sell tokens?” Mr. Levitt asked as he slid a MetroCard through the turnstile just before 10.

To be honest, Mr. Levitt, the president of a trading company called Emgee Commodity Corporation, is not as much of a stranger to the subway as most of his fellow traders. They are guys—it is mostly guys—who think of themselves as financial cowboys, and cowboys ride alone, in Mercedeses and Range Rovers, not in the subway with everybody else. Traders are independent and swaggering. Traders refer to things as “bad boys.” (As in, “Put some cream cheese on that bad boy,” instructions to a diner waitress overheard near the new commodities exchange in Long Island City.)

Asked how his coworkers used to commute to Lower Manhattan, Mr. Levitt answered as if the question were purely rhetorical: “Well, they drove.”

Mr. Levitt is a little different. He grew up on the subway. His father was a subway token clerk. As a kid, he sometimes sat on his father's lap in the booth, pushing dimes through the slot, and he remembers the thrill of the Sea Beach express to Coney Island. “I used to know all the lines,” he said, smiling proudly.

But he worked hard, he made money, he bought comfortable cars and, frankly, like a lot of people, he thought of the subway as a little creepy, even when it started to get less creepy.

He did not mind the Long Island Rail Road. He did not consider himself too good for mass transit. But whenever it was time to get to Yankee Stadium to enjoy his season tickets, it was always in his car.

“Late at night up there, it's kind of weird-feeling,” he said. “There are lots of rats crawling around on the tracks.”

Before last week, he said, he took the subway maybe once every few weeks, when he could not find a cab. But yesterday, as he held onto a pole inside a bouncing No. 7 express on his way to work, it sounded as if he had not taken it nearly that often.

“They've really done a good job with the graffiti, haven't they?” he asked, glancing around.

In a city that says its future—at least its immediate future—will have to be tied up much more closely with mass transit, maybe Mr. Levitt is the best the city can expect.

He is certainly not happy about it, but he is doing it anyway. Before work yesterday, over toast and fried eggs, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a directive from the commodities exchange to the traders. He pointed to a sentence that he considered rather amazing: “You are encouraged to take public transportation,” it said. “And if not, try to carpool.”

He smiled. “Look at that,” he said. “First time I've ever seen that. That's something for your story.”

“It's not so bad, the subway,” he said, shrugging.

Then he reconsidered, like any good straphanger. “The subway would be better if I could get a seat.”

—ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED OCTOBER 20, 2001

THE MAP MAN

Maps tend to be pretty static things—at least those of known lands like New York City that were long ago explored and charted and colonized with delicatessens and dry cleaners.

At this late date, the chances are slim, for example, that a mountain will be discovered in Brooklyn. In Queens, 60th Place, 60th Road, 60th Avenue and 60th Street will probably always come disturbingly close to intersecting. Manhattan will continue to look like a lopsided schooner headed down the Hudson.

All this means that mapmakers tend to be pretty sedentary types themselves. They talk about concepts like land shape and symbology and information design. They do not usually swap stories about the last map crisis.

That is, until September 11, when so many things changed, including the humble mission of at least one city mapmaking department: the one that draws the subway map.

When the World Trade Center towers collapsed, the subway map that had been preserved under glass in 468 stations and in thousands of train cars instantly became a historical document. Hundreds of feet of tunnels on the 1 and 9 line were caved in like old mine shafts, to be closed for years. The N and R lines were skewered with steel beams. Dozens of other stations nearby were too dangerous to use, for days, maybe for weeks. And in the chessboard that is the subway system, where any move necessitates a dozen more, the scramble began.

It also began in the map department, where they are not used to this sort of thing: the subway map has been redesigned only three times in the last 25 years.

It is difficult to describe this department as a department because it is, more or less, one laconic, bearded former Georgian named David Jenkins who works in downtown Brooklyn in a gray-upholstered cubicle where there are so many piles of maps that it is difficult to walk inside.