A Day in the Subway, as It Rolls Up a Century

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Yoni Brook/The New York Times
The W Train curved into the skyline from Queens Tuesday.

Shannon Stapleton for The New York Times
An R train is washed at the Jamaica yard in Queens.

John Marshall Mantel for The New York Times
A century-old ritual. Waiting for a train at Broadway and 96th Street.

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times
Michael McCain, left, a conductor, and his passengers on an A train in the Times Square station at 12:15 a.m. Tuesday.

Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times
Lorenzo LaRoc, one of the most successful subway musicians, at Grand Central.

Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who will preside over the ceremonies marking the 100th anniversary of the New York City subways Wednesday, often takes trains to various events. He was waiting for a No. 2 train Tuesday.

October 27, 2004
A Day in the Subway, as It Rolls Up a Century
By RANDY KENNEDY

FOR a New Yorker just one day shy of turning 100 years old, the subway kept crazy hours yesterday. In other words, there were no hours it did not keep. As its neighbors around the world locked up their stations and turned out their lights, the subway started a new day, just as it has more than 36,000 times since Oct. 27, 1904.

A few minutes after midnight, as she always does, Celeste Clarke stood inside a red brick building looking out over the vast Jamaica Maintenance Yard at the southern tip of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens, the nesting place where more than a thousand subway cars from the E, F, R, V and G lines return at the end of their runs, to be washed and swept, greased and patched, and then sent out again.

Ms. Clarke stood in front of a big green panel with 86 levers that looked like something designed by Willy Wonka, above which sat an antique-looking lighted map of the yard and its fanned-out tracks. To the squelch of walkie-talkies and the light rock on the radio, Ms. Clarke walked up and down, her hands in motion like a maestro, opening the switches and signals that pumped trains back into the system like valves in a giant heart.

"I'm like the Vanna White of the subway system," she said.

The levers she moves look like the ones her predecessors moved when the subway started. The trains she dispatches still run on the same kind of wheels (steel), sit atop rails of the same gauge (4 feet, 8.5 inches) and draw the same blue-sparking direct current (625 volts) from the ominous third rail. The trains themselves might no longer have straps or cane seats or ceiling fans, and the price of boarding one might have increased 3,900 percent over a century, from a nickel to $2. But the experience of taking the subway in New York has changed little in its fundamentals since 1904, drawing an unbroken line back to that first day, when Mayor George B. McClellan grabbed a silver control handle and, at 2:35 that fall afternoon, started the subway in motion for the first time.

Trying to describe a day in the subway is a little like trying to take a snapshot of the wind. It's everywhere and nowhere in particular. You can feel it and hear it yet chase in vain to capture the essence of the life lived along some 700 miles of track, inside 468 stations, where New Yorkers have done everything they've done on the streets above and more. They've been born there and died there. They've lived there and eaten there and slept there and dreamed the dreams they missed during the too-short nights before. They've found their muses and their soul mates. They've lost their wallets and their patience and, sometimes, their minds.

Today, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and thousands of others will celebrate the subway's centennial with ceremonies and speeches. But telling the story of an average day in the subway - in all its mundane monstrosity - is as good a birthday present as any for a working monument that helped invent New York City by holding it together, day after day.

At 12:05 a.m., as Ms. Clarke was pumping fresh trains into the lines, Larry Taylor, 41, a security guard at an office building on Columbus Circle was riding the longest one, the A train, which runs 31 miles from the top of Manhattan through Brooklyn and Queens and then across Jamaica Bay, where passing gulls drop clams on the tracks to shatter their shells.

As he does every night Mr. Taylor was heading back home from work in Midtown, joining the first waves of night riders: the graveyard-shift workers, club goers, case-carrying musicians and sleepy, wandering homeless people who populate the trains from midnight to dawn.

"They call the A train the 'Animal Express' because there are so many wild things riding here at night," Mr. Taylor said, his legs stretched stiffly into the middle of the aisle, the Barcalounger freedom of the night rider. "If you don't see it on this train, it ain't anywhere to be seen." This night was mostly calm, but Mr. Taylor said he had seen some things that amazed even him on the weekends, when the drinkers come out in force and "the real function at the junction gets started."

"I might snooze once in a while on the job," he said. "But no way, no how I'm snoozing on this line. Homey definitely don't play that."

On another A train headed to Bedford-Stuyvesant, Natasha Abbott, 23, was telling two friends her great subway story, the one about the magician. One night last month aboard the A, she said, a magician was trying to pull a quarter from behind a girl's ear. The girl's boyfriend misunderstood and, just as a fist was on its way to the magician's face, a dove burst from the magician's breast pocket and flew out into the car. "It was so intense," Ms. Abbott recalled. "The whole train started laughing."

By 2:15 a.m., on another A train making its way from Utica Avenue back to Manhattan, the cars were starting to get that familiar overnight saloon smell. LaRay Farrow, a onetime subway singer and now a salesman at an electronics store, was headed to the West Village to a bar called Alibi, and was trying to prime the pump.

"I get my buzz going on the train before I get to the bar," explained Mr. Farrow, 30, sipping from a bottle of Beck's in a brown paper bag. "Beer is too expensive at the bar so you got to do your work before game time." He reminisced about his first years in New York, when money was tight, and he took that leap that so many other brave and desperate subway riders have taken: He decided to sing and pass around the cap for his supper. It was one afternoon on the platform at the Broadway Junction station in East New York, where the crowd was tough and the police were tougher.

He chose Donny Hathaway's lovely "A Song for You," which has a few lines oddly appropriate for a subway singer:

"I've acted out my life in stages

With 10,000 people watching

But we're alone now

And I'm singing this song for you."

But his career in subway music ended early and badly.

He was arrested.

"No joke," he said, adding: "That was a New York City come-to-realize kind of moment."

But in a subway system that practically invented the mass transit busker - mimes, doo-wop groups, mariachis, singers dressed in horse suits, Michael Jackson impersonators, people who play everything from kazoos to zithers to musical saws - other performers sometimes fare much better.

LORENZO LaRoc, stepped out of a cab on 42nd Street in front of Grand Central Terminal at 6:37 a.m. It was still dark, but Mr. LaRoc, the Heifetz of the subways and probably one of the highest-earning musicians in the system, no longer has to take the train to his gigs. He plays a strange electric instrument with a Plexiglas body the size of a violin and the longer neck of a viola.

His lone roadie, Robert Colon, unloaded Mr. LaRoc's equipment from the trunk of the cab - three amplifiers, a car battery, a microphone, a folding table, a folding chair and a box of compact disks - and tied it onto two carts, which they haul down to the mezzanine level at Grand Central and drag through the turnstiles near the 4, 5, and 6 trains, his regular stage.

For a performer as successful as Mr. LaRoc, the show unfolded with almost scientific precision. It began with Mr. LaRoc laying out seed money, four one-dollar bills - it takes money to make money, he explains. He then repeated only two songs, both of his own composition - "Savage Lover" and "Montuno in F." He keeps the list short, he says, because he estimates that his audience turns over completely every four and a half minutes. And his entire concert lasted only about 2 hours, through the height of the jam-packed rush, during which he sold 67 of his CD's at $10 a copy and had a wad of bills piled in his violin case.

By 9:30, it was time to pack up. "We made money," he announced triumphantly." The cops left us alone."

He added: "If I stayed, I'd clean up, but I'd be taxing my creative energy."

RUSH hour was now winding down, the last eddies of office workers swirling out of trains at Penn Station and Times Square. It was 9:45, almost time for Millie Mendez, a platform conductor on the uptown 1, 2, 3 and 9 platform in Times Square, to take off for lunch. "Lunch, breakfast, whatever you want to call it," she said.

"I call it lunch, baby. I start here at 6."

A train pulled in and Ms. Mendez - who has become somewhat famous just for doing her job and unleashing her foghorn of a voice, which has earned her the nickname "the Ethel Merman of the subway" - bounded into the crowd for the last time before her break, imposing order and enforcing manners.

"Step aside," she boomed. "Let 'em out! Let 'em out! Please and thank you! Thank you and please!"

As the train departed, she was asked whether she had any wisdom to impart on the occasion of the centennial. Not much, she said, other than Millie's First Commandment of the Subways:

"Don't worry, honey. There's always another train coming."

Michele Acosta, 38, from Bay Ridge - legal secretary, mother of two, wife of a police officer - was among the last wave of the rush-hour commuters to arrive in Times Square on the R train, long renowned as one of the slowest in the system. But like many working mothers, she does not mind. She had a seat. She had her book - "How to Make Millions in Real Estate in Three Years Starting With No Cash."

And best of all, she had anonymity and quiet, the kind of quiet that only New Yorkers can hear. Yes, the train wheels might be squeaking and the train deafening, but no one is talking to you, calling you or asking you to do anything. "Riding the subway is like a vacation," she said, "because at home - it never stops."

The trains do not either, though they were beginning to thin out. By 12:30, the crowds were sparse enough so that riders on an uptown No. 2 train could easily recognize their fellow passenger: Mr. Bloomberg, who made a campaign vow to ride the subways and has valiantly stuck to it. He was on his way to Columbus Circle, standing as usual, with his bodyguards, and letting the fellow voters have the seats.

"It's nice to see him on the subway," said Vojtech Bystricky, who has spotted the mayor underground more than once. He added, appreciatively, "He is as likable as a Republican can get."

With the autumn sun beginning its early descent, the tide of humanity began to flow back the other way. Ms. Acosta was back on the train, taking a different, faster route home, the 6 train from Grand Central to Union Square and then the R - a sacrifice of a seat, maybe, for speed at the end of a long day. Paul Schneider, 24, a headhunter from TriBeCa, was getting off the 6 at Canal Street, along the route of the original subway line that ran from the old City Hall station through Midtown and up to 145th Street. Though his daily routine has blurred his appreciation of the great institution through which he travels, he grew almost patriotic when thinking about the landmark the subway would reach the next day.

"It epitomizes New York City," he said, and then added, taking in the station, "Look at all the trash people throw around. They wouldn't do that in an old church."

As midnight approached last night at the Jamaica yard, a tower operator, Marianne Kreuter, was ending her shift. She was pulling the big levers in the room overlooking the yard, preparing to send trains out into a new century. "It's like choreographing a ballet,'' Ms. Kreuter said as she flipped the switches on the control panel. "And you can call me Georgette Balanchine."

Reporting for this article was contributed by James Barron, Michael Brick, Ann Farmer, Janon Fisher, Corey Kilgannon, Colin Moynihan, Jennifer Steinhauer and Ian Urbina.