Subwayland (26 page)

“To be filed,” Mr. Jenkins said yesterday, scooping up a heavy armful of important-looking documents from a chair and dumping them on the floor.

Mr. Jenkins is a graphic designer who moved to New York in 1981 to work on things that he hoped lots of people would look at. He ended up working on one that several hundred thousand people look at intently every day.

His first job with the Transit Authority was the subway map, back in the days when it was not computerized, when he and the authority's design contractor would have to mash little lines of tape down onto plastic overlays and hope they remained stuck where the subway lines were supposed to be. (“We always swore the tape was animate. That there were little organisms in there that moved them during the night.”)

Eventually, Mr. Jenkins began to oversee the more exciting, more protean bus map, leaving the subway to counterparts at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. But when the Trade Center attack happened, Mr. Jenkins was the man who had a working version of the newest subway map on his computer that could easily be edited.

And so, for the next two weeks, he became a kind of cartographic oxymoron: the emergency mapmaker. He worked 12-hour days through the first weekend after the attacks, etching away the solid red line that ran on the 1 and 9 from Chambers Street to South Ferry, rerouting the N and R, the J and the M, and adding stations one by one as they reopened.

He had a temporary map printed quickly in black and white. And he also began posting the computerized version on the M.T.A.'s Web site, the first time the site had been used so actively to inform riders. (Peter Kalikow, the M.T.A. chairman, said that the site usually received about 200,000 hits a day and that one day, the week after the attack, it received 10 million.)

It was not a role Mr. Jenkins was accustomed to. “You just can't turn these maps on a dime,” he explained yesterday, in a deliberative Southern drawl that has not been damaged by his time in New York.

But turn them on a dime is exactly what he did. One Monday, he was awakened by a phone call telling him that a new subway station had just opened. He got out of bed, found the map on a disk he had brought home and made the change. Then he e-mailed it to the M.T.A.'s webmaster and, as he put it proudly, “people saw it when they were still in their slippers.”

He even resorted to last-minute map heroics. The other day, he stood in a printing shop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where a small emergency map was rolling off the presses. His phone rang. The Franklin Street station on the 1 and 9 line was reopening. But the map coming off the press still showed it closed, indicated in red ink.

Mr. Jenkins sprang into action, uttering, in so many words, the immortal phrase that they get to say only in the movies:

“Stop the presses!”

—ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED OCTOBER 9, 2001

SOMETHING IN THE AIR

Some people try to laugh about it, but it's not very funny anymore. “For years,” wrote one subway rider, in an Internet discussion, “I had always joked that the air in the subway would overpower any bacteria/virus that could be introduced.”

Others have settled into angry resignation. “I'm not crazy about being in the subway, no,” said Ralph Dominguez, in the Clark Street station in Brooklyn yesterday. “But what's your employer going to do if you say, ‘I don't think it's safe on the subway, so I'm not coming to work?' How else am I going to get to work?”

Others are asking themselves that question, but not rhetorically. They are trying to find new ways.

A Manhattan hospital worker is taking the bus instead of the subway, but the bus is packed—probably, she thinks, with people who have the same idea she has.

Last week, a writer drove his girlfriend to work two mornings in a row because he heard at a party that friends from Spin magazine had been told to stay away from work on Thursday, October 11, and the rumor swirled that this was because Spin had been tipped off to a smallpox attack in the subway. (A Spin spokeswoman denied this, but told reporters that the magazine was concerned about security that day, exactly one month after the Trade Center attack.)

The writer, who does not want his name printed because he still cannot decide whether he was paranoid or prudent, added, “At the time, we just thought it would be better to be safe than sorry.”

Before September 11, fear seemed to be one of those things—like panhandlers or cars without heat—that was becoming more and more scarce in the new and improved subway system. Crime was down. Subway cars were crowded at 2 a.m. Tourist guides were stressing how benign the infamous subway had become. (“Statistically safer than walking the streets in daylight,” one read.)

But first the attack changed that sense of security, and then the anthrax scares sweeping the city seemed to tip the scales, causing even seen-everything straphangers to start looking around, suspiciously, on their platforms.

“It makes you think about it all the time,” said Mr. Dominguez, 25, a young man who doesn't usually dwell on his mortality. But right down the platform from him, at the shadowy mouth of the East River subway tunnel, he could see a police officer, Sal Menendez, standing guard to make sure that no one dashed down the tunnel with destructive intent.

There are now officers just like him at every river tunnel entrance in the city, 24 hours a day. And down inside the tunnels, says the Transit Workers Union, track workers are vigilantly looking for suspicious bags or boxes or anybody without ID pinned prominently to their uniforms.

“People don't say much to me,” Officer Menendez said yesterday. “They look down, and I think they know why I'm here.”

The Internet, where commuter chat rooms are humming with talk of the subway as a target, has become a kind of barometer of fear. There are discussions about how the subway is the perfect engine for a chemical attack, because the gusts of air caused by the trains would sweep substances hundreds of yards and spew them up through the grates onto the streets.

There are discussions of preparations, but not for survival. “Just make sure you have a will, designate who will care for your children, pay the insurance premiums and hope they pay off in the event of terrorism,” one subway worker wrote.

There is also evidence of a level of official concern that goes well beyond party rumors and speculation. Last week, Daniel D. Hall, the deputy chief of the Metro Transit Police, responsible for the safety of the subway in the Washington, D.C., area, sent a message to a New York subway enthusiast Web site asking that a map showing a detailed track layout for the Washington Metro be removed.

“I don't think that it is appropriate to publish maps of the Washington Metro, that specifically show rail transfers and crossovers,” Mr. Hall wrote.

David Pirmann, who founded the site, said he decided to comply, and the map is now gone. But he said he is sometimes as worried about overreactions as about the real dangers facing the subways.

“That map isn't anything that someone riding in the front car couldn't have drawn,” he said. “I worry about people going overboard and about what fear does to us.”

So, in retrospect, does the writer who drove his girlfriend to work.

“It does seem a little silly to me now,” he said. “I mean, Spin's a music magazine. They know when Beastie Boys tickets are going on sale. What do they know about terrorist attacks?”

—ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED OCTOBER 16, 2001

A SIMPLE MEMO

New York City Transit puts a lot of faith in paperwork. At times, it seems to have missed the whole computer revolution, or at least mistrusted it. In fact, in a dusty file room in downtown Brooklyn, there are boxes containing minute-by-minute records of the daily movements of your subway line, going several back years—all handwritten, on paper.

But in the weeks since September 11, weeks that have generated enough paperwork to wrap every subway car like a Christmas gift, there are three pieces of paper that have survived consignment to the oblivion of a cardboard file box.

Instead, they have been copied and copied again and passed around like Soviet samizdat. They were written by a 55-year-old man named John B. McMahon, who works as a superintendent over several stations in Manhattan. The pages are dated and stamped, and start like any transit memo, heavy on military accuracy and acronyms, like “F.O.” for field office.

“While at my office at 42nd Street and 6th Avenue at approximately 0900 hours,” it begins, “the F.O. notified me…”

But as the memo continues, recounting Mr. McMahon's journey on September 11 from his office to the area around the World Trade Center, it quickly becomes apparent that it is something other than official correspondence.

It is the soliloquy of a man trying to figure out what happened to him that day. In essence, it is a memo from Mr. McMahon to himself.

That morning, he rushed downtown to get into the Cortlandt Street station on the N and R line to make sure that no passengers or transit employees remained inside the station. When he found none, he went back up onto the street and, as debris began to rain down from the fires in the towers above him, he took refuge under a glass awning in front of the Millenium Hilton Hotel.

At 9:58 a.m., he looked up.

He saw what appeared to be a ring of smoke form around the south tower.

“Except,” he wrote, “that this ring was coming downward.…”

There was a truck parked next to him, in front of a loading bay at Cortlandt and Church Streets, and he dived between the truck and a roll-down door, grabbing onto the bottom of a wall.

Instantly, he wrote, “There was an upward, vacuum-type of air movement, followed by a ‘swoosh' of air and then … NOTHING. Not a sound, but pitch-darkness with a powderlike substance covering every inch of the area. It also filled my eyes, ears, face and mouth.”

He struggled to breathe. He scooped ash and dust from his mouth. But as soon as he did, his mouth would fill up again. He felt other people around him, and he remembers hearing himself and the others count off, signifying that they were still alive.

“Then,” he wrote, “the strangest thing happened.

“While I was facing this wall, I turned my head slightly to the left because I saw two lights that were too big to be flashlights and there were no automobiles around. Although I thought I was losing my battle to breathe, I was comforted by the lights, which gave me a sense of peace. We yelled, ‘Help,' and joined hands, walking toward the lights. The more we walked, the lighter it became, until finally I saw images of cars and people.”

But as he emerged from the cloud of ash, he wrote, he looked around him and realized that he was not holding anyone's hand. He was alone. He has no idea what happened to the other people. He still has no idea what the lights were or who was with him, and no idea how he found his way out of the debris.

“I'm a Catholic,” Mr. McMahon said yesterday. “But I only go about once every five years. I don't know what that was that day. I don't know how to explain it.

“Somebody got me out,” he said.

Mr. McMahon wrote the memo to his boss on a yellow legal pad at the end of that week, sitting in his backyard in Westbury on Long Island. When his fiancée read it, she cried.

“I wrote it,” he said, “because I had to get it off my chest.”

The day it happened, as Mr. McMahon recounted in the memo, he wandered until he came upon New York University Downtown Hospital, where nurses pulled him inside and checked his vital signs. He rinsed out his mouth and took a shower. Then he had his fiancée buy him some new clothes at Macy's so he could, as he wrote, “finish out my day performing my duties.”

He is taking some time off now, struggling with hearing loss and problems with his right eye, which was injured by the dust. More than those ailments, he said, he is struggling with his own mind.

“When I tell my psychiatrist, I know it all sounds crazy to him, but that's the way it happened,” he says.

Mr. McMahon's memo ends like thousands of others in transit offices around the city. On a line by itself are the words:

“For your information.”

—ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 6, 2001

PUTTING THE PIECES BACK TOGETHER

On Thursday of next week, a bugler will play taps and mourners will carry a stretcher with a flag from the depths of the pit at ground zero. With that, the recovery will officially end and the rebuilding of a large part of an impatient city will begin.

But even more impatient than the city is the subway that moves its citizens through it.

And so, while real estate firms and victims' families and city officials await the ceremony and try to figure out what to build above the ground, a few hundred men have already been rebuilding, for more than two months now, what was below the ground and what will be there again: the No. 1 and No. 9 subway lines.

From the precipice of the pit, these workers look at first like all the rest, swarming over the scarred land in hard hats, day and night. But in a few minutes you can tell that their cranes are depositing steel, not extracting it. Their blowtorches are welding, not cutting. And the beams in their part of the pit are straight, not twisted, the first signs of order in a place that still looks like chaos.

“This place right here,” said Dilip Patel, New York City Transit's construction manager for the rebuilding, “this is where the new tunnel begins.”

Mr. Patel stood yesterday morning in the twilight of a tunnel mouth beneath Liberty Street, pointing down at a faint line in a concrete floor, near a dirty rubber boot and a plastic coffee lid.

On one side of the line was a piece of history, the sheared-off end of an IRT subway tunnel completed around 1918. On the other side, to the north, was the beginning of a tunnel that was built only in the last few weeks, its walls and floor finished and workers positioning the metal forms to pour its concrete roof.