Subwayland (9 page)

“This is the ride,” he said.

“Yes,” Mr. McLamore agreed. “This is the ride.”

(There was a time, back when the subway system was in very bad shape, when Mr. McLamore would drive trains that did not have enough power to make it up the uphill curve in the river tube with a full load of passengers. “We used to have to stop at Canal Street and dump everybody out,” he recalled.)

Mr. McLamore does not really have any least-favorite spots along the line, except that for a while he really loathed the Utica Avenue station in Brooklyn, where a man would position himself at the front of the platform every day and launch a large wad of spit at the train's windshield.

There was no violence done, but suffice it to say that last Friday, there was no man waiting to spit on Mr. McLamore's train.

Asked what was the strangest thing he has seen on the A train in his 18 years, Mr. McLamore paused for a minute at the end of his shift. He conferred with the train's conductor, Mary Tillman.

They both decided that it was the pigeons.

“Pigeons will get on at Far Rock looking for food that the car cleaners didn't get,” Mr. McLamore said.

“Then when the doors close, they'll take the train one stop and get back out.”

“You think I'm kidding, don't you? I'm not kidding. The pigeons take the train.”

—ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JANUARY 23, 2001

PATROLLING THE HOLE

It is not the most conventional method, but a great way to examine how far the New York City subway has come over the last three decades is to consider the medical records of a man named Brendan J. McGarry.

To his friends and family, Mr. McGarry is Joe. To everyone else, for most of his adult life, he has been Officer McGarry. Next year will be his 30th patrolling the place he likes to call “the hole.”

Here, presented chronologically, are a few entries from Officer McGarry's occupational injury chart: dislocated shoulder, torn cartilage in right knee, hairline skull fracture, fractured right hand, broken nose, broken nose, broken nose.

The injuries tend to taper off in seriousness and frequency as the years go by, making them a reliable record of not only how violent and chaotic the subway once was, but also how nice and orderly it has been made by comparison.

To spend an afternoon on the beat with Officer McGarry, 53, in the Times Square station is to understand the true distance between these days and what were probably the subway's worst days. For the rest of us, this progress has been a very good thing. For Officer McGarry, frankly, it has made life a little dull.

“You don't want to say that, really, because people can ride the trains again without being terrified,” he said. “And I'm no glutton for punishment, but back then? Your blood was always pumping.”

“You walked out of the station,” he said, “you got a collar.”

But now, even when working undercover in plain clothes, Officer McGarry said he might go a whole day or two without making a collar. And even then, the arrest will usually be a fare beater, a class of criminal that is now central to subway crime-fighting strategy. Back in Officer McGarry's youth, he said, fare beaters generally did not merit more than a dirty look.

“They'd laugh you out of the station,” he remembered. “They'd say, ‘Get out of here with that. You're not bringing that in here.' We were bringing in rapists, muggers, murderers. Some very bad people.”

Officer McGarry came to policing as a young man with a more complex understanding of bad people than some. He was born in Dublin. His family moved to New York when he was 3. By the time he was a teenager, he was a member of a mostly Irish street gang called the Crusaders, an affiliation that helped him make up his mind about what to do as an adult.

In other words, the judicial system made up his mind for him. “The judicial system said to me, ‘Son, you need to make up your mind, and if you know what's good for you, your mind will be leaning toward the military.” (Officer McGarry would not elaborate on his youthful offenses. “No convictions,” he stressed. “If I'd been convicted, I wouldn't be in this uniform today.”)

The United States Marines took him to Vietnam, and his experiences there opened Joe McGarry's eyes to the once-unthinkable possibility that he might actually make a good police officer. He started in 1972, a year the subways were so violent that his cadet class was pulled out of training early to lend a hand to the overburdened force.

His first arrest, he said, should have been a clear indication of what was to come. It was in the Rector Street station on the Broadway line. A huge, bearded construction worker was on the subway platform, roaring drunk. (“Even sitting down, this guy is taller than I am standing up.”) Officer McGarry asked the man to calm down. He asked him to calm down again. The man's response was to poke his index finger through the hole in the “P” on the brass Transit Police insignia on Officer McGarry's uniform.

Over the next several minutes, the man proceeded to smash Officer McGarry into every one of the candy machines that used to sit along the Rector Street platform. To Officer McGarry's credit, he did not let go of his suspect. And before the man could drag Officer McGarry up the steps of the station, a token clerk came out of her booth and beat the man into submission with a metal folding chair.

The dislocated shoulder and wrenched knee were the results of that first arrest. The other result was that Officer McGarry, trying to handcuff the construction worker, ended up getting confused and handcuffing two police officers together, “which I heard about for the next four years,” he said.

Just for contrast, here, briefly, was the scene on the beat with Officer McGarry last Thursday beneath Times Square. The radio crackled. He sped to the situation. The problem? The mostly well-heeled crowd trying to jam down onto the N and R platform was much too big.

“Why are you keeping all of us from going down to the platform?” a woman asked Officer McGarry.

He smiled, mischievously.

“We get lonely,” he told the woman. “We figured this way we could have a conversation.”

—ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 27, 2001

WHAT IF YOU ARE THE SICK PASSENGER?

Orin Faison is a very nice guy. He is 33. He lives in the South Bronx. He will talk your ear off if you give him a chance.

But if you are a passenger on the Lexington Avenue subway line, you do not want to make Mr. Faison's acquaintance.

In fact, among the people you do not want to have even a brief relationship with in the subway, Mr. Faison probably ranks somewhere between an arresting police officer and an escaped convict.

This is absolutely no reflection on him. It is because getting to know Mr. Faison generally means just one thing: that you have become “the sick passenger,” the one referred to in all those signs that ask the slightly sickening question, “What if You Are the Sick Passenger?”

And if you are anything like the hundreds of other sick passengers whom Mr. Faison has come across and helped in two and a half years working as a rush-hour emergency medical technician in the subway, it means one or more of these things:

• That you have fainted, either because you are pregnant or overheated or undernourished or overweight. Or because you just donated blood. Or because the morning after arrived a little too hard on the heels of the night before.

• That you have fallen—either because you fainted or tripped or were tripped or were in too much of a hurry—and that Mr. Faison has collected four of your missing teeth from the platform. (This happened at the High Street station in Brooklyn, when a woman fainted and fell face first onto the concrete.)

• That you have almost fainted or fallen, but instead you just threw up. (Mr. Faison carries a red plastic bag for those who somehow manage to avoid this special indignity until they get off the train.)

It also might mean something much worse. A few months after starting his job, Mr. Faison rushed to the aid of a man in his early 60's inside a train in the Bronx. The man was lying partly beneath the seats, shaking, apparently in the middle of a seizure. As Mr. Faison examined him, the man lost consciousness, stopped breathing and went into cardiac arrest. Mr. Faison started CPR but the man made it only as far as Lincoln Hospital, where he died.

“That was my very first one,” Mr. Faison said solemnly the other morning at Grand Central, waiting for the next sick passenger to come his way. “It kind of shook me up.”

Mr. Faison—a big, compassionate man who sees disfiguring accidents lurking wherever he looks—belongs to a small crew of subway E.M.T.'s who were posted on the platforms beginning about three years ago.

The motive behind hiring them was not exactly Hippocratic, as officials at New York City Transit will fully admit. But the subway is not in the business of providing medical care, they point out. It is in the business of getting passengers from place to place, safely and with some speed. This means that if a passenger falls ill on a train, of course transit officials want to get him into the hands of medical professionals.

But with equal ardor, they want him off the train so it can keep moving all the comparatively healthy passengers. With this goal in mind, the medics are stationed at nine of the most packed stations in Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn.

John G. Gaul, who oversees the numbered subway lines, said a 15-minute wait for the city's Emergency Medical Service during rush hour at these stations can mean that as many as 13 trains will stack up behind the one stalled with the sick passenger.

The trains could be carrying as many as 2,000 passengers apiece, which means that one sick person could be delaying about 26,000 people behind him. Which increases the chances that a couple of those 26,000 are going to pass out, too, from sheer stress. In other words, sickness breeds more sickness.

“The highest percentage of sickness happens at the busiest stations, during the busiest times, in the peak directions,” Mr. Gaul said.

During his time underground, Mr. Faison has become something of a sociologist of sickness. He observes that people tend to fall ill on Monday mornings more than on any other day of the week, probably because of weekend excess. They fall and hurt themselves at night and on Fridays, probably also because of excess of some sort.

Despite New Yorkers' legendary impatience, those riding near a sick passenger tend to show incredible compassion, he said. They offer their bags or roll up their coats for pillows. They use their newspapers as fans. They offer a lot of chocolate and orange juice.

“People think that sugar can always keep someone from going into seizures,” Mr. Faison said, adding, “‘E.R.' Way too much ‘E.R.'”

Sometimes, he said, forward-thinking people also help the sick passenger by helping themselves a little, too.

“They've picked the guy up, they've got him right near the door when the train gets into the station. And they're like: ‘Here you go. This is for you.' And then the train pulls out again.”

—ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED MARCH 13, 2001

THE SCIENCE-FICTION TRAIN

You have probably seen it. And like the people on the F train platform last week, you probably stopped and stared and tried to squint through the windows at the people inside it, their faces bathed in a blue computer glow.

It is far too short to be a real subway train. It is far too clean to be a work train, the kind that shuffles through stations in the dead of night, full of soot-covered crewmen.

It purred into the station, at Seventh Avenue in Brooklyn, the other morning, and when its blue-and-silver door opened, one expected science-fiction smoke to pour out and the crew to emerge in space suits.

Instead, from the mystery train stepped a very earnest man named Marcelo Vargas, with a neatly knotted tie and a clipboard. And when he explained exactly what his train does, it was easy to see why he was placed in charge of it.

“This car measures the geometry of the tracks,” he said.

“It is called Track Geometry Car No. 2,” he said.

“We have two of these cars,” he added.

It is that kind of methodical precision that New York City Transit likes to see in the job that Mr. Vargas does: making dead sure that the rails upon which a few million people a day move through the subway system are straight and smooth and as close to 56 and a half inches apart as two pieces of steel can be after being rolled over endlessly by 70,000-pound cars.

What happens, exactly, when the geometry of the tracks is bad instead of good?

“The train could actually fall down to the ground,” Mr. Vargas says helpfully.

“That is called a derailment.”

He invited a visitor aboard his train that morning and set off south toward Ditmas Avenue on an easy run, to calibrate some equipment. The single-car train—which cost $2.5 million, weighs 45 tons and has logged more than 50,000 miles in the last decade—had just finished a full rail examination earlier in April, sniffing along every inch of active track in the system, more than 600 miles. It was time to get it back into shape for the next trip.

Onboard, beeping and glowing in the darkness of the tunnel, was the kind of equipment generally associated with jets and space shuttles, not old-fashioned wheels on steel.

A laptop computer produced what looked like electrocardiogram squiggles, the lines charting whether there were bumps in the rails, whether the rails were at the same elevation and whether they were the correct distance apart.

A spinning laser on the front of the car limned the edges of the tunnel, measuring to make sure that the bulging concrete walls didn't come too close to the top of the train. And another device filmed the tunnel ahead with a heat-sensitive camera. On the television screen attached to the camera, workers in the tunnel appeared as bright red specters. Signal lights looked like red supernovas. And occasionally, the man who monitored the heat camera, Noel Rivera, spotted a tiny red flash that betrayed a gap in a rail, where it should have been conducting electricity but was not, throwing off a system that tracks the trains' locations.