View from Underground

In the annals of New York City public transit, the egregious law suits make the headlines. In February, for instance, the MTA came out on the wrong end of a case when a jury awarded $2.3 million to a man who lost a leg after falling onto the tracks with a BAC twice the legal limit. In April, a victim of a bus accident won over $27 million.

It seems that those cases — the ones that make the headlines — represent the tip of a large iceberg. Last year, the MTA spent around $57.6 million on personal injury claims. That total, which comes out of the agency’s operating budget, has increased by over $20 million since 2004, and the MTA wants to put an end to these injury claims. The Post’s Tom Namako has more on the suits:

The chronically cash-strapped MTA has become a money train for riders filing personal-injury lawsuits, forcing taxpayers to dole out tens of millions of dollars a year. The payouts come from the MTA’s day-to-day operating budget, which recently got a $1.6 billion bailout for 2009.

About 2,750 claims are filed every year, from people taking a simple spill while on MTA property to bone-headed buffoons who try — and fail — to outrun subway trains, said Martin Schnabel, NYC Transit’s chief lawyer.

“There are a small, but not insignificant, number of cases every year of people intentionally on the tracks coming into contact with trains,” Schnabel said.

Per Namako, the MTA Audit Committee has isolated this area of liability as a source of lost MTA revenue. According to a recent committee report, the MTA is currently facing 7800 lawsuits and receives around 3000 claims a year.

While juries tend to look favorably upon the MTA — 96 out of 150 jury decisions last year were in favor of the transit authority — agency lawyers would like to see Albany ban suits from those who “get themselves into dangerous situations.” In other words, if another Dustin Dibble is too drunk to stay on the platform, the MTA would prefer not to be liable for his injuries.

As an aspiring law student, transit advocate and tax- and fare-paying subway rider, I can certainly appreciate where the MTA is coming from on this issue. At a time when the agency is facing an extreme cash shortage and fares will soon be going up, they don’t want to be liable for the stupidity and irresponsibility of their riders.

The question centers around limiting liability. How can the MTA block these lawsuits from the get-go? Right now, if the MTA is not at fault, a jury would decide it so. The authority would still incur costs of litigation, and those mount up substantially over time. If Albany is serious about reining in MTA spending, tort reform would certainly be an interesting starting place. I don’t think our state legislature is spoiling for that fight though.

Every now and then, as I’m on my way back to Brooklyn from W. 4th St., I’ll spy a life-sized Cookie Monster banging on the xylophone and a weird-looking pink thing strumming a bass. These two musicians are members of the Xylopholks, and a few weeks ago Flavorwire’s Mandy Van Deven interviewed the eccentric-looking group. The group talks about playing in the subway, seeing the shocked looks on the faces of other straphangers and getting harassed by the police. Check them out in the video above.

Is this art or vandalism? Twenty five years later, the debate still rages. (Photo by Martha Cooper)

It’s hard for New Yorkers in 2009 to conceptualize what the subways were like 25 years ago. I was reminded of this fact earlier this week when my Criminal Law case tackled the ever-popular decision in People v. Goetz. That seminal case, as students of New York history know, involved the vigilantism of Bernard Goetz on a subway car in 1984.

Without touching upon the moral issues raised by the case, the class discussion showed a clear divide between people who had grown up in New York and people who hadn’t. Those who hadn’t were having a tougher time understanding what the subways were like in the 1980s.

These days, we have no qualms about riding the trains at 2 a.m. heading home from a night out. Twenty five years ago, though, the graffiti-covered trains, prone to electrical problems, track fires and all sorts of breakdowns, were just not that safe. But back then, the system wasn’t that safe, and everyone knew it.

During the same year as the Goetz shooting, Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant released a book called Subway Art. The tome — a picture book — was one of the first to focus on the graffiti-covered subways as an art form. Today, the duo is reissuing the book in 25th Anniversary form with a whole slew of new photos. (The old one is available online here in its entirety.)

Over the weekend, as part of the recognition of this book’s release, The City Section ran a profile of Cooper, and it elicited some interesting feedback from New Yorkers who lived through the downs and ups of the city’s subway system.

“Wish that non-native NYers would stop idealizing the graffiti-covered trains,” wrote one lifelong New Yorker on Twitter.

And that’s the real debate, isn’t it? Should we be glorifying graffiti or should graffiti serve as a reminder of lawless and decrepit days underground when the subways were safe and New Yorkers used them not because they wanted to but because they had to?

In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell explores all of these issues. The combination of the public outcry over the Goetz shootings and the NYPD’s push in the mid-1980s to rid the system of graffiti helped turn the subway systems around. No longer were the subways viewed as Anarchy Underground where anything went because no one was around to police it.

We sit here comfortably in 2009, and we’re able to look back on graffiti-covered trains as art if we so choose. I have to wonder though if we should so choose. This book and The Times’ coverage of it glorifies what in its simplest form was a destructive crime that contributed to the problems — both actual and perceived — that plagued the subways. Is it art for art’s sake or art done at the sake of other people’s safety?

Today, the parallels to the times of the graffiti-covered trains are not inapt. The MTA is facing funding shortfalls that could lead to massive fares and a partially shuttered system. Station agents will be let go, and that fear of safety could creep in around the edges. Perhaps the best way, then, to appreciate the impact street art had would be to talk about its problems as well as its artistic value. If we glorify this vandalism- and crime-filled past, don’t we risk repeating it?

One day, my train to the plane may come. (Photo courtesy of NYCSubway.org)

When we last checked in on New York’s ambitious plans to build a one-seat rail link from Lower Manhattan to JFK Airport, it was 2007. In April of that year, Senator Chuck Schumer was on the verge of securing a $2 billion federal grant for the rail link, but transit advocates didn’t see the $6 billion project as feasible or a true priority at the time. A few weeks later, the city killed hopes for funding for the potential rail link when they announced that congestion pricing revenue would go to the MTA.

Both congestion pricing and the plans for the JFK Rail Link have since fallen by the wayside. The mayor’s congestion pricing died an inglorious death in the New York State Assembly, and that $2 billion in federal money never materialized. It remains tied up in the Senate because Republican Senators Judd Gregg and Jim DeMint believe it is a prime example of federal spending run amok, and the Rail Link plans simply haven’t materialized.

Recently, Eliot Brown of The Observer checked in on the dormant tunnel from nowhere. Brown secured a new engineering statement for the project. In Dec. 2008, the MTA cost estimates for the rail link were between $8.6 billion and $9.9 billion. Those figures, however, are based on 2006 costs. The true cost is significantly higher today. The Rail Link, it seems, is a plan for another day, another year, another time.

But what of the $2 billion, asks Brown? It could still be ours, he writes, if it ever makes it out of the Senate:

The language of the failed bills makes the funding applicable to “any transportation infrastructure project, including highways, mass transit systems, railroads, airports, ports and waterways, in or connecting with [Lower Manhattan].”

“Right now, the political will needs to be to get the $2 billion allocated to the City of New York,” said Steven Spinola, president of the Real Estate Board of New York, which continues to push for the rail link.

In a statement, a spokesman for Mr. Schumer suggested the senator will continue to try to get the funding secured in Congress, through he did not specifically mention the rail link. “Senator Schumer is committed to securing the federal funding promised to New York for Lower Manhattan transportation projects on the next appropriate legislative vehicle,” the spokesman, Joshua Vlasto, said.

I first started Second Ave. Sagas in 2006 because Schumer had pledge more federal money for the city’s subways. He has been instrumental in funneling money toward New York, and if he could do it again, the Second Ave. Subway, among other projects, is sure to benefit. The Republicans in the Senate, however, are not too keen on releasing those tax credits.

The Rail Link is dead. Never officially killed, the project no longer makes fiscal sense for the city. The only time it ever did was when Robert Moses built the roads to then-Idlewild and opted against included a right-of-way for mass transit. But there is hope yet for the money.

“This is money that was promised New York to help make it whole after the terrorist attack,” Robert Gottheim, a spokesman for Rep. Jerrold Nadler, said. “We’re going to use it for legitimate transportation.”

And if Nadler can’t get it, Schumer can always step back into the fight. As the RPA’s Bob Yaro said to The Observer, “I’m sure he’ll find a way of doing it if there is a way of doing so. He’s very persistent about these things.”

Photo of the altered MoMA installation by Doug Jaeger. A complete set of images from the attack are available here at PSFK.

For the last few months, a group of so-called street artists going by the Poster Boy moniker has taken to the subways. The idea, as presented recently by New York Magazine, is that by editing — or vandalized — subway ads and recreating them as something else, the artists are making some sort of political/creative statement.

Over the weekend, this group attacked the MoMA installation in the Atlantic Ave./Pacific St. station. By the time I heard of the attack and took a walk through the station yesterday at 3 p.m., nearly all signs of it were gone, and the concourses were teeming with police officers. A poster — the one pictured at right — had to be replaced and one of Aakash Nihalani’s boxes remained on a supply closet door.

As word of this attack spread, the response has been odd, to say the least. One of the groups responsible for the installation — not MoMA or CBS Outdoors — seems to have been complicit in the vandalism, and MoMA has had to deny responsibility for any role in the defacement of their installation.

New York Magazine’s Vulture blog broke the news of the attack on Tuesday:

[Poster Boy’s] accomplice was a less likely culprit: Doug Jaeger, the marketing executive who created the campaign for MoMA. Jaeger is CEO of the brand-management agency the Happy Corp and president of the prestigious Art Directors Club.

Wearing official MoMA jackets, the two convinced the MTA guards and station police that they were there on official business. Poster Boy and his crew then proceeded to mash up the reproductions in traditional PB-style, meaning Andy Warhol’s Marilyn was made to look as though she had a nose job, and a cutout of a race car was positioned to dive into another painting. When they were done, Jaeger staged a fashion shoot in front of Poster Boy’s reworked creations, using hired models and a professional photographer (the above model’s face is pixelated — says Jaeger, who hopes to sell the images at some point — because he doesn’t have permission to use his/her likeness without consent).

“Early on we saw Poster Boy’s work, and we realized it was inevitable that if we did this project, his crew would likely see it as an opportunity. Whenever you create something, you want to make sure you’re prepared for that,” Jaeger says. “What I would hope is that it would cause debate and generate some argument, at a minimum.”

Later in the day on Tuesday, with CBS Outdoor, the lessor of the advertising space, criticizing MoMA for allowing this act of subway vandalism to go on with their tacit approval, the Museum denied knowledge and responsibility. “As far as we’re concerned, the Happy Corp is MoMA’s agent and has been throughout this entire process, so to detach them now at the eleventh hour when something kind of funky happens is not an assumption that I would make,” Jodi Senese, CBS Outdoor’s executive vice-president of marketing, said to Vulture. “They vandalized our property and they really got involved in vandalizing MTA property as well. I think it’s a negative press image that they’re pushing on the MTA and on us.”

MoMA’s spokesperson simply said, “That is not correct” when a New York Magazine reporter asked if the Museum had known about or approved Poster Boy’s changes prior to the attack.

While publicly the MTA, MoMA and CBS Outdoor have reached a detante, the debate over this art-cum-vandalism has raged online for a few days. Some commenters on PSFK feel that this mash-up is the very definition of Modern Art while others are worried about the chilling effects of this so-called stunt.

Personally, it’s tough to condone this work. At its basic level, it’s nothing more than glorified subway graffiti set forth under the pretext of a social statement. That one of the originators of the installation participated in the scheme should raise some red flags at the MTA, and the “artists” who impersonated MoMA employees are probably guilty of more than one crime here.

Maybe there is some artistic value in the Poster Boy movement. But I don’t see it. To me, it’s just plain old vandalism.

Where: The 96th St. station on the West Side IRT.
What: Signs of progress during the ongoing renovation.

As part of a plan to substantially rehabilitate and renovate the IRT stop at 96th St. and Broadway, construction crews have unveiled a new look for the wall tiles. Gone are the ugly old black-box 96 numbers. Replacing them are red mosaic 96’s that are a part of the wall. I particularly like the mosaic trim as well.

I grew up near the 96th St. station, and I’m excited to see the new station house on Broadway between 95th and 96th Sts. While this picture provides a tantalizing glimpse of what the inside of the station will resemble when the project wraps up, it still has a long way to go.

Photo taken at my mom’s suggestion by my dad with his Blackberry last Saturday night.

Where: The passageway from the 4/5/6 at Grand Central Terminal to the 42nd St. Shuttle.
What: A misspelling of Madison Ave. captured via iPhone by SAS reader Nick M.

It’s been a rough week for the MTA’s signs and its general overall spelling ability. Last week, New York City Transit came under fire for a 70-year-old typo at Broadway along the IND Crosstown line. Since then, savvy straphangers have noticed misspellings everywhere. My favorite is the one about Queeens. Such are the ways of the Internet.