View from Underground

The 59th St. Bridge isn't feelin' too groovy these days. (Photo by flickr user wallyg)

Immortalized in song by Simon and Garfunkel in the mid-1960s, the 59th St. Bridge will soon have a new name. As part of an effort to honor former New York politicos, the Bloomberg Administration announced yesterday that the Queensboro Bridge will be renamed for Ed Koch and the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel for Hugh Carey. So now if there’s too much traffic on the RFK, you can jet down the Koch to get to Queens.

The former mayor was quick to embrace the honor that sees a 101-year-old bridge deprived of its rightful name. “It’s a workhorse bridge,” Koch said of the landmark. “And that’s what I am, I’m a workhorse. Always have been. I feel very compatible with it.”

Koch also praised former Governor Carey as well. “I’ve been trying to get something named for Governor Carey,” he said. “I think he was the best governor of the modern era and saved both the city and the state from default and from bankruptcy.

The current mayor was equally as magnanimous as the old. In a statement issued yesterday, he said that the Queesnboro Bridge, like Koch, is “icon of the city that’s been bringing people together for a long time.” It was a day for humility it seems.

Over the past few years, the state legislature has gone on a naming binge. We have the Joe DiMaggio Highway, the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge, the Ed Koch Bridge, the Hugh Carey Tunnel and the Jackie Robinson Parkway. Unfortunately, as famous names are appended to iconic and familiar roads, the names lose all meaning. It’s much easier to figure out where the West Side Highway, Triborough Bridge, Queensboro Bridge, Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and Interboro Parkway are than it is to give directions to these location-less named parts of town.

For city too, these changes aren’t free. At a time when municipal dollars are stretched thin, New York is going to have to come up with money for new signs. It cost the city $4 million to rebrand the RFK Bridge, and everyone stills just calls it the Triborogh Bridge. This time, the city is going to look for private donations to cover the costs. Perhaps Mr. Koch can fund his own bridge.

While the City Council seemed enthusiastic about the new names — “Over 40 years ago, the Queensboro Bridge had Simon and Garfunkel feelin’ groovy and today there is no one in our city groovier than Ed Koch,” Christine Quinn said — not everyone shared the joy. “To glibly rename things is very sad,” Bob Singleton, a Queensboro Bridge historian, said.

But tongue-in-cheek sarcasm aside, watching the state simply give away the names to these iconic structures raises some questions. Just a few days ago, the Wall Street Journal pondered the role naming rights will play as cities look to close budget gaps. Public schools and parks may soon carry corporate names while transit systems in Philadelphia, New York and Chicago have begun to auction of the names of subway stations.

While it’s undeniable that naming rights can lead to dollars, many across the country have not been keen to embrace the intrusion of the corporate into the realm of the public. Do we sacrifice convenience and usability for the sake of money? In New York, we’re sacrificing instant name-and-place recognition for the sake of honoring historical figures, most of whom aren’t alive to appreciate the honor.

Maybe, then, naming rights aren’t the way to go without stringent guidelines. I’ve long believed that subway stations can append corporate names but shouldn’t replace geographical identifiers with place-less sponsorships. If Disney wants to buy the Times Square station’s naming rights, it shouldn’t be called Walt Disney Station; rather, it should be called Disney-Times Square. People need to know where they’re going.

But it’s too much to ask of our state legislature to keep convenience in mind. New Yorkers will still give directions to the Battery Tunnel and the Queensboro Bridge because those are the landmarks we know and that’s where the roads lead. When someone asks “How you doin’?” the answer shouldn’t be “lost trying to find my way to the Ed Koch Bridge.”

When: Wednesday, December 8, 2010 at around 1:30 p.m.
Where: The back end of the Manhattan-bound platform at the 7th Ave. stop along the Brighton Line

This sad, neglected — and broken — pay phone has become a de facto trash receptacle. Someone, perhaps angry that they missed the train or annoyed with the caller on the other end of the line, smashed the earpiece off the headset, and the phone now dangles to the side. On top of the now-useless pay phone is an empty coffee cup, discarded earlier in the day because there are no nearby garbage cans. The pay phone is bound to remain broken for longer than the coffee cup will stay there, but at least the broken relic of another era had its morning joe.

Across New York City, various neighborhoods are noticeably lacking subway service. Stretches of Brooklyn and Queens far from Manhattan suffer from a lack of direct transit access while cross-Bronx service is non-existent and even Alphabet City, a locus of growth and gentrification, is a long hike from the nearest subway. As it takes far too many years and far too many dollars, the options for system expansion are limited, but that doesn’t stop people from trying.

Back in October 2008, after a pair of development conferences with planning experts from across the New York Metropolitan Area, the Regional Plan Association put forward a report entitled “Tomorrow’s Transit: New Mobility for the Region’s Core.” It highlighted numerous ongoing projects including the Second Ave. Subway, East Side Access, the 7 Line extension and our dearly departed ARC Tunnel, but its more intriguing sections propose subway extensions that expand service beyond the current capital campaign. Just imagine if money were no issue.

We start in Manhattan where the Second Ave. Subway dominates the day. Much of the RPA’s document focused around making use of a new Manhattan trunk line. Instead of terminating at East. 125th St. and Lexington, as current SAS plans propose, the RAP’s Second Ave. Subway would run west to intersect with the various subway lines along 125th St., terminating at the 1 stop along Broadway. That’s a common-sense proposal though that could happen if New York every found the money to do so.

In the southern reaches of Manhattan, the RPA’s plan involves some additions near and dear to our hearts but with some odd limitations. For Alphabet City, the RPA proposed the old tea-cup handle extension of the SAS along Ave. C in order to provide “widespread benefits for lower income areas,” a main thrust of “Tomorrow’s Transit.” Also for Alphabet City, the RPA proposed dropping a staircase at Ave. A and 14th St. to provide for access to the First Ave. L stop. I’ve been told in the past that the tunnel depth and underground space limitations preclude that plan, but it’s one that has long been an obvious exit point.

Further uptown, the RPA wants to explore extending the 7 line extension further south with a possible connection to the Canarsie Line. In Midtown, transit can be improved by adding light rail to Broadway. Remember: We’re living in Transit Fantasyland here.

In the Bronx, let’s send the Second Ave. Subway everywhere. The cost-prohibitive 3rd Ave. extension is designed to better server areas without very much subway service while the Metrolink Extension would use the Amtrak right-of-way to serve Co-Op City. The 3rd Ave. extension would replace the lost El train and connect across the Bronx to the 207th St. terminal area in Upper Manhattan. If anything, this routing is a bit haphazard and would raise capacity issues in Manhattan.

Meanwhile, Brooklyn suffers from the opposite problem: It’s proposed extension don’t do enough. In the southeast corner of the county of Kings, the RPA would advocate building out two stops along Nostrand Ave. and constructing the long-awaited Utica Ave. line. I recently explored the tortured history of these subway expansion plans, and I’d want to see something even more ambitious. Shoot for the ocean or at very last, Sheepshead Bay and Marine Park.

Again, the Second Ave. Subway enters the picture as well. Once East Side Access is complete, the RPA would convert the LIRR’s Atlantic Branch into a rapid transit line via the Second Ave. Subway. Say good bye to the Transit Museum as this plan would reactivate Court St. and the outer platforms at Hoyt-Schermerhorn. On another note, the one-stop spur on the L to Starrett City seems to be more trouble than it’s worth, and the super express J service has been debunked elsewhere.

And finally, Queens. The RPA would spur off the Queens Boulevard past Rego Park along Jewel Ave. to better serve the Kew Gardens area. Similarly, the Queens Bypass straight to Forest Hills would alleviate a lot of crowding along that Queens Boulevard line. The southeastern Queens extension would be a huge boon for that area as well.

Ultimately, these plans are nearly as ambitious as the old Second System proposals, and unfortunately, they’re just as likely to see the light of the day. While the RPA rates projects as long- vs. short-term and high vs. low capital on a spending scale, these exist only on paper for a time when money is abundant. If we could expand the system willy nilly without concerns for cost, this isn’t a bad blueprint for it, but as we look at “Tomorrow’s Transit” two years later, only the BRT aspects are finally come online. Fifty years from now, will New York City still be recycling the same old subway expansion plans?

For more on the RPA’s “Tomorrow’s Transit” plan, check out the report right here as a PDF.

Via Sarah Kaufman on Twitter comes this mesmerizing video. Shot on high-speed aboard a train at Bath Spa in Britain, this video captures the essence of a platform as a train slides by. The train was moving at around 35 miles per hour as the video was shot, and the people are frozen in time, watching and waiting to begin their commutes. For more on the video, check out the videographer’s explanation. I’d love to see this reproduced on board a New York City subway car. Imagine the looks on people’s faces as a 2 train slides into Times Square.

The original Penn Station as seen from the Gimbels department store. (Via the Library of Congress on flickr)

During an as-yet unpublished part of my interview with Jay Walder, the MTA CEO and Chairman spoke of the progress the authority has made since the early 1980s. When Walder started at the MTA in 1983, track fires and power outages plagued the system, and the mean distance between subway car failures was a meager 7000 miles. Today, after three decades of investment and new rolling stock purchases, Transit’s fleet averages 150,000 miles between failures. No one should miss that era.

Yet, 1970s nostalgia is alive and well in New York City. Urban dwellers who either moved here too late or were born to late experience all that the city had to offer during its darkest days have a tendency to glamorize them. People yearn for the “art” of graffiti-covered subway cars. They bemoan the state of tourist-filled Times Square and harken back to an era of prostitution and peep shows. Alphabet City? Fuhgeddaboudit. They cleaned that former haven for drug users and dealers decades ago.

The latest in 1970s nostalgia comes from Tom Scocca and Choire Sicha. Last week, they penned an ode to Penn Station for The Times. Now, this isn’t about the McKim, Mead and White Penn Station that was unceremoniously destroyed in the 1960s. Rather, they’re talking about the rat maze of tunnels shoved underneath Madison Square Garden that does disservice to the idea that a train station should be a Great Public Work.

The lamentations over the death of Penn Station began, they say, “before the bulldozers,” but we should celebrate the current version of Penn Station for what it represents and offers. The pair, one of whom at least one is not from New York, offer up a paean to an era when New York was “gritty.” It’s a comparison that plagues baseball players of a certain quality as much as it is one that falls upon New York City as its nadir. They write:

What has been forgotten in this hysterical nostalgia is that our current Penn Station is also a miracle: pitiless and comically jury-rigged, sure, but miraculous. Three railroads and two subway lines deliver more than half a million people each day directly to almost anywhere except Grand Central. It is one of the great achievements of New York…

Because everyone agrees that Penn Station is a failure, nobody has ever tried to make it anything other than baffling to the outsider. That’s the famous welcoming spirit of New York! The Long Island Rail Road has no interest in telling anyone how to get to New Jersey Transit, and vice versa. No one is in charge of knitting it all together, or no one bothers to. It’s bad bureaucracy and bad faith, not bad design — though at least our bureaucracies reflect our metro-area standoffishness…

This is a diorama of our recent history. People love to say they miss the ragged, gritty, vivid aura of New York in the ’70s. Yet it still lives! Down in the corridors of Penn Station, you can appreciate how much effort it takes to hold off entropy. Think of it as a ’70s theme park, but without gangs or muggers or hookers roaming around … very frequently. It is the careful chaos of this commuting ballet and the marvelous cultural freeze-frame of our city that the worshipful cult of the Old Penn Station want to destroy.

There is nothing in Penn Station to suggest bad faith and bad bureaucracy have anything to do with the conditions, and there is everything — from poor signage, to complicated and convoluted staircases and exits — to suggest bad design. Simply put, Penn Station is indicative of a design from a time when the city didn’t care about public transit, and it shows. It isn’t a structure that deserves glorifying.

The remains of the Gimbels Passageway bring long-time New Yorkers back to a more dangerous era. (NY Post/Chad Rachman)

At the other end of the spectrum is a column on the Gimbels Passageway from Steve Cuozzo of The Post. The Passageway, once a clear sign of the dangers of the subway system, made headlines earlier this year when Vornado announced plans to reopen it as part of its Penn Plaza development plan, and Cuozzo reflects back on the dangers that lurked in this passageway for many decades before it was shuttered. He writes:

To revisit the long-closed Gimbels Corridor is to relive New York’s past-tense future. In the early 1970s, conditions in the pedestrian tunnel presaged the bleeding city of the 1980s and early ’90s. Filthy, fetid and unpoliced, it entertained rampant lawlessness, squalor and decay years before they fully possessed the streets…

Prior to a recent “tour,” I hadn’t set foot in it since 1974 or ’75. Back then, the interminable, 800-foot stroll, as long as four city blocks, was too much even for my youthful spirit of adventure. Street weirdos and sex hawkers on Eighth Avenue were amusing; knife-wielding hustlers, legless beggars and the howling insane in a dimly lit corridor a mere nine feet wide for much of its length were not. The mad harmonica player who stalked me end to end was the last straw.

Once you were inside, there was no way out except to reach the other end. In the midst of teeming Midtown, bare-bulb fixtures like those in mines marked a path through a Calcutta-like sprawl of diseased, predatory humanity. The corridor seemed to exist beyond the reach of any authority. Vornado says it’s owned by the MTA. The MTA says it’s owned by Amtrak, which told me it thinks it owns a portion of it. Who was in charge 35 years ago is an even deeper mystery.

While Cuozzo’s story may verge on the hyperbolic, he point remains the same. “Those,” he says, “who romanticize our dark age need a tour, too.” We don’t want our transit system to slip back into a state of disrepair, and we don’t want to view the 1970s disregard for investment as anything but a bad stretch of years in the city’s otherwise illustrious transit history. The Gimbels Passageway and Penn Station, with its Moynihan-filled future, is but a metaphor for a route we should avoid.

One state senator thinks rats in the subway could become less of a problem if eating were to be outlawed. (Photo by flickr user Ludovic Burtron)

As I sit here stuffed on turkey, food is on the mind. I ate a lot of it tonight and then brought some back to Brooklyn on the subway. Along the way, I didn’t see anyone eating on the train, but I often do. Chicken fingers, sandwiches, muffins — you name it, and people eat it. That, however, might end if State Senator Bill Perkins has his way.

These days, Perkins is fighting an uphill battle against a familiar New York scourge. He wants to combat the rat, a rodent so prevalent in New York City that one author has written an award-winning book about them. They survive everywhere and love the subways for the free food.

Earlier this month, Perkins’ office released a report that highlights the rat problem in the subway. In an unscientific survey, Perkins determined that rat sightings are a major problem. Over 57 percent of respondents said they saw rats in the subway on a daily basis, and nearly everyone pointed food and litter in the subways as the major cause of infestations.

Transit, meanwhile, knows it has a problem. As Thomas Prendergast said at last week’s NYCT Rider’s Council President’s Forum, the subways are filled with trash. MTA workers remove garbage every day from the system, and still, people drop food in subway cars and discard wrappers into the tracks. “Customers don’t like to hear that they’re part of the problem,” Prendergast said, “but we pull out 90 tons of trash a day from the subways.”

Now, Perkins has an idea to combat the rats. He wants to ban food in the subways all together. “Rats don’t grow the food that they eat on the subway, and they don’t buy it, either,” Perkins said to NY1 this week. “We as customers, unfortunately, are the ones that are feeding, and thereby breeding the rodent infestation problem we have.”

Perkins wants the MTA and its contractors to better bait the subways. While Transit has sealed off garbage collection rooms and drainage pipes, these areas are not continually baited. The authority is exploring more agressive rodent control measures, but as cleaners are eliminated and stations get dirty, the agency is facing an uphill task. To that end and for the sake of public health, Perkins thinks draconian measures are in order. “We recommend to them what we know is taking place in other places, like Washington, DC, other countries, where food is outlawed on the public transportation system,” he said.

Perkins, who is now trying to convince straphangers to sign onto this idea, isn’t the first to propose a food ban in the subways, and he want be the last. Forces though conspire against him. New Yorkers rushed for time believe they should be able to nosh on breakfast or lunch in the trains, and the MTA earns a small but steady income from newstands that sell food underground. They couldn’t outlaw eating in the system while maintaining these stands.

Personally, I don’t find eating in the subway that sanitarily appealing in the first place, but I doubt it’s going anywhere. So as long straphangers litter and treat the subway floors with no respect, the rats persist, just as they always have.

The Daily News tracked down some creative sign editing from Harry Potter aficionados. (Photo via the Daily News)

Via Lauren Johnston of the Daily News comes this amusing edit of a subway sign. A few mischievous Harry Potter fans decided to slap a new sticker onto one of the subway entrances at Union Square. The bullet proclaims a stop for the 9 3/4 train — a number near and dear to Potter fans for it is the track at London’s Kings Cross Station from which the Hogwarts Express departs.

The new sticker, notes Johnston, is “slapped in the slot that featured a “W” until June when that line went out of service. The design mirrors the style of standard Metropolitan Transportation Authority signage and at first glance could pass for a relic from the days of the defunct No. 9 line.”

The agency said it had nothing to do with this rogue train marking and reminded people that the fine for defacing an MTA sign is $75. “We are not part of any sort of Potter campaign, but I’ve seen things like that before,” Transit spokesman Kevin Ortiz said to the News.

The sticker was last seen on the south side of 14th St. just around the corner from the Regal Union Square 14. Well played, I say. Well played.

When I say no one wants to see this video, I sincerely mean that no one wants to see this video. First posted by the Village Voice’s Runnin’ Scared blog earlier this week, what you see here is a close-up of a bed bug on a seat on the R train. It was spotted by a group of commuters on a Bay Ridge-bound train near 36th St., and one varmint expert has confirmed that this brown insect does indeed resemble a bed bug.

“That looks pretty believable to me,” Maciej Ceglowski of the Bedbug Registry said. “I can’t make out what kind of bug it is from the video, but it’s the right size and moves in the right way to be a bedbug. And I do know there have been other confirmed subway sightings.”

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard about bed bugs taking over the subway. In early 2008, a few intrepid reporters spotted infestations in various wooden subway benches, but the MTA has not, by and large, made a public stink about it. That could change soon.

On Tuesday evening, I went to the New York City Transit Riders Council President’s Forum with NYC Transit President Tom Prendergast and a variety of other Transit higher-ups. While the meeting featured mostly personal complaints and subway minutiae from the audience, Prendergast repeatedly levied a charge toward Albany. Without political and economic support, he said, the TA’s hands are tied. (For a little bit more on this aspect of the forum, check out John Mancini’s report at NY1.)

What struck home to me though was a conversation Prendergast had with Marvin Holland, the chair of the cleaners’ section at the TWU. Holland has been an outspoken organization for the union for years, and he opined on the cleanliness, or lack thereof, underground. Noting that bed bugs have been spotted throughout the system, he said, “We have to get more cleaners or it’s not going to work. hat is happening is cleaners are being overworked. And then they’re getting physically broken down. And then they can’t come to work.”

When cleaners don’t come to work, Transit doesn’t fill their shifts with workers accruing overtime. Rather, trains and stations just go uncleaned. The MTA has been up front with this approach to cleanliness. They’d prefer to invest their limited dollars in track and car maintenance to ensure that trains run frequently and smoothly, and if the environment underground suffers, well, said Prendergast, that’s the devil’s choice they have to make.

In response to Holland’s complaint, Prendergast acknowledged the lower staffing levels of cleaners and promised that Transit was doing what it can to bring back workers who can improve conditions underground. He stopped short though of drawing what I think is a logical inference. “Customers don’t like to hear that they’re part of the problem,” he said, “but we pull out 90 tons of trash a day from the subways.”

The inference is an obvious one, and another speaker whose name I didn’t catch let it all out. She has been a station monitor for years, and she says she routinely sees people disregard societal norms as they discard their trash everywhere but in the garbage cans. They drop papers and cups onto stations floors; they leave discarded chicken bones underneath seats; they spew sunflower seeds and spill drinks. It is, in other words, a human pig sty.

It’s true that Transit’s own approach will not help the situation. Cutting cleaners won’t ever improve cleanliness, and the way that some station cleaners drag garbage bags — and thus leave a trail of grimy litter water in their wakes — doesn’t help. But responsibility can start with the people who ride the rails. After all, we have as much an interest in keeping the system clean for ourselves as the MTA does, and I don’t know anyone who discards dinner on the floor of their dining room instead of in the trash.

Bed bugs and rat infestations are serious problems that require serious responses once they start to unfold. We the riders can’t do anything about it once the bugs are there, but our attitudes go a long way toward ensuring that bugs and rats don’t find the subway attractive in the first place. Until the garbage ends where it belongs, perhaps Prendergast and Holland should feel more comfortable telling riders that they are a part of the problem indeed.