Subwayland (27 page)

When the workers are done at the end of September and trains with passengers are rumbling through the tunnels once again by November, it will be very hard to tell where old meets new, exactly where it was that 1,300 feet of subway tunnel were crushed and pierced by falling skyscrapers and then rebuilt in little more than seven months.

“This is a job that, under normal circumstances, could take two years or more,” said Lawrence G. Reuter, the president of New York City Transit. “I've been in this business a long time, and I've never seen anything like what's going on down at the 1 and 9.”

Neither have the tunnel workers who arrive there around the clock, passing through the throngs of ground-zero tourists on Church Street. Yesterday, taking their breaks, they could stare over the so-called bathtub wall, where below they could see all that was still left of the World Trade Center, a small ashen heap less than two stories high, tiny now amid the 16-acre expanse of the site. Near the pile, a group of 20 firefighters raked carefully through a field of debris before it was scooped away.

“It's sad, sad,” Mr. Patel said. “It's not an easy job for anyone here.”

Even in the brand-new tunnels, reminders of the catastrophe refuse to be completely erased. A beam from 7 World Trade Center pierced the tunnel north of Vesey Street, and try as they might, the workers said, they could not pull it from the bottom of the tunnel, where it lodged like a horrible Excalibur.

“We tried to pull it out with big wire cables, but it kept snapping the cables,” said Avelino Alonso, a transit employee. “Who knows how far it went down?” So they just cut it off, leaving it buried beneath the new tunnel floor. Yesterday, workers in hip waders poured more soupy concrete on top of the beam, preparing for the tracks to come later.

“It's like ‘Planet of the Apes' down here,” said John Pegno, president of A. J. Pegno Construction Corp., which, along with Tully Construction, is in charge of the $1-million-per-day-project. “It's very surreal.”

In places, the job still looks more like an archaeology dig than a subway rebirth. The ragged ends of the old tunnel walls can be seen, layers of rust-colored brick interspersed with concrete, the layers glued together with thick black mastic to keep water out.

And in fact, in many ways, Mr. Patel said, the new tunnels will have nothing all that new about them, except the addition of almost a century. They are based on old IRT drawings for the line, found in transit archives. Beams will still brace the tunnels every five feet, as in the old tunnels. Ties will still be made of wood. The steel, of course, will come from Pennsylvania.

“We think that they had the right idea 100 years ago,” Mr. Reuter said. “We're a big fan of not fixing something that's not broken.”

From the workers' point of view, however, there is a whole lot broken. And they have less than five months left to fix it. A visitor wished the general superintendent, Jan Szumanski, good luck yesterday.

He rubbed his sore left arm and nodded. “I will need it,” he said.

—ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED MAY 21, 2002

WELCOME BACK

Sometimes it seems as if the subway is not man-made but has been around forever, like a rock formation or a river, and so it should abide by certain steadfast natural laws. Such as:

The 1 and the 9 trains should go together, like Fred and Ginger, like bacon and eggs, and neither should ever go to Brooklyn. They should go to the South Ferry terminal, which should be too small and too curved. And when the trains arrive, they should always make a sound like a tsunami sweeping through a sheet-metal factory.

Yesterday morning, at least in the subway, it felt as if the world had been righted again.

It was a Monday at 9 o'clock. The Staten Island Ferry emptied its waves of weary-looking workers into the South Ferry terminal. They crowded, jostled and jammed their fingers into their ears as the scream of the trains returned to the tip of Manhattan.

And through it all, almost to a person, they smiled gratefully, like someone reunited with a long-lost brother.

“I never thought I'd say it,” said Justin Hoyt, standing in front of the token booth as the din of wheel and rail drowned him out, “but I'm very happy to hear that sound again.

“It's an old, old sound.”

For many New Yorkers, the ceremonies that marked the anniversary of the September 11 attack provided a moment to try to reconcile themselves to what had happened, to move ahead.

But in a city that has never been good at introspection, others looked in more mundane places for reassurance. They looked for their old routine, more precious to them than they had ever realized, and on the brand-new subway maps yesterday, many found it once again.

Little more than a year after an entire subway tunnel was crushed and the system shut down for the first time in decades, the map now looks almost as it did before September 11. The Cortlandt Street station on the N and R line is reopened, full once again of the oddly comforting sight of shopping bags lugged down from the Century 21 department store across the street.

The 2 and 3 trains are back on the express tracks in Manhattan. And the 1 and 9 are running, unbelievably, almost through the middle of ground zero to South Ferry again, through 1,400 feet of new subway tunnel built in six months—ahead of schedule and under budget, the first ribbon of rebirth amid the swept desolation of the World Trade Center site.

Walking into the South Ferry station yesterday morning, two women applauded before they swiped their MetroCards. A Staten Island man had his video camera to record the moment. Another, wearing a black “Got Beer?” T-shirt, said fiercely that he was proud to be a New Yorker.

Meanwhile, Samkutty Samuel, a station supervisor, stood in front of the station waving at people and announcing over and over through a bullhorn:

“Welcome back to South Ferry! Everybody smiling! Everybody happy!”

They were, and the two happiest men were not even commuters.

They were wearing hard hats and official-looking reflective vests and expressions of great professional pride.

One was Mysore L. Nagaraja, the chief engineer for New York City Transit and the man in charge of the tunnel reconstruction. The other was Jan Szumanski, the general superintendent of the project for Pegno/Tully, a contracting partnership that rebuilt the tunnel.

Mr. Szumanski said that shortly after the tunnel was completed on September 1 and the first diesel train successfully ran through to test it, he and his workers held a celebratory barbecue virtually atop the tunnel, toasting it with beer bottles.

“I think that once in your life, if you are lucky,” he said, “you get to be part of something very special, and this was it for us.”

He added, his voice beginning to crack, “For me, this is my repayment to America, for taking me 20 years ago from Poland, a nobody. That's how I think of it.”

Mr. Szumanski, who has hypertension, put so much pressure on himself to finish the job early and well that he suffered an attack in the spring and was briefly hospitalized.

“I fell down, and so they took me to the hospital,” he said yesterday, shrugging. “It was no big deal.”

But he concedes that he has planned a long vacation in November in Mexico, where he feels that his chances of running into subway officials will be low.

Mr. Nagaraja, sounding almost serious, said to him, “Please bring your cell phone.”

Behind them, the exodus from the ferry into the reborn subway continued, and practically the only way to tell that this Monday morning was different from any before the attack was that everyone seemed almost disturbingly pleased to be on his or her way to work.

Angela Brown, a transit worker who helped cut the ribbon when the station reopened on Sunday, reassured a visitor that this, too, would return to normal and make us all feel much better.

The terrorists, in other words, could not stop our subway, and they certainly cannot take away our right to look unhappy when we ride it.

“I give it a week,” Ms. Brown said.

—ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 17, 2002

 

PHOTO CREDITS

Man playing violin: Tyler Hicks/
The New York Times

Subway car in station: Ruby Washington/
The New York Times

Togetherness, circa 1960: Sam Falk/
The New York Times

Mayor Bloomberg on the subway: Frances Roberts

Shouting subway worker: Angel Franco/
The New York Times

Pigeon on subway: William Lopez

Married couple: Nancy Siesel/
The New York Times

Subway turnstiles: Michael Nagle/
The New York Times

9/11 rubble in the subway: Angel Franco/
The New York Times

SUBWAYLAND
. Copyright © 2004 by
The New York Times
. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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eISBN 9781466867635

First eBook edition: February 2014