Tonight I found this origami swan made from a $1 bill, perched on the uptown platform of the 1 train at the West 86th Street station

I’m a year behind on my Will Smith-based summer blockbusters. So tonight I watched I Am Legend. I’m reading The World Without Us so it made sense to check out a cinematic view of a Manhattan populated only by Mr. Smith, his spunky German Shepherd, a few generic humans and hordes of computer-generated barefoot zombies.

According to what I’ve read in the Manhattan doomsday scenario presented early in Without Us, there likely wouldn’t be any rats around New York City after a few years without human life: the only reason they’re here now is for our garbage. (Incidentally, despite survive-a-nuclear-blast urban legends, cockroaches would die off without humans around to provide the warm habitats they need.)

I also think the roads of Manhattan wouldn’t be as smooth as they appear in the movie. One of the first things to fail in New York without electricity, according to Without Us, would be the pumps that keep the subways dry. The tunnels would fill quickly, the subways’ steel support columns would rust and collapse, and the streets above would gape and sink. In some cases, rivers would appear in their place.

The movie in five words: Cast Away set in Manhattan.

I found this handwritten flashcard on the floor of the A train last night. There’s not an answer on the back and the suspense is killing me: anyone know which valve has the lowest transvalvular velocity?

I’m still doing that thing where the subway pulls up and it’s jam packed except for the car that stops right in front of me, as happened with an uptown 1 train at the 59th Street station tonight, and my mind says, “Whee! Nearly empty car!” when it should be screaming, “Look out!”

Because when the car door opened and the giddy group of commuters pressed forward, we realized the car was desolate because of the large yellow puddle of puke on the floor, which someone had halfheartedly attempted to cover with a few McDonald’s napkins. The napkins had no effect; the puke resembled chunky polenta and judging by the smell, contained enough gastric acid to dissolve the napkins and possibly the floor’s wax.

The person at the fore of our group, an old, fat and slow-moving lady, stood teetering in the doorway, stymied as to whether she should enter or retreat and wait for the next train. Those of us stuck behind her were all like, “C’mon lady, make up your mind,” because we were cranky and wanted to get home. That’s the test of a true New Yorker—possibly a metaphor for living here in general: Are you on the puke train or are you off?

Andie left me an urgent voicemail at work early this morning, then gave me a follow-up call, to relate two distressing developments in her commute today.

First, a bum took a crap on her in-motion downtown 1 train, causing all passengers in a 15-foot radius to surge to the far end of the car and cling together like the final passengers alive aboard the Titanic.

Then, upon arriving to her gym prior to work, she came across a guy who had died while working out. Paramedics on the scene continued unsuccessfully to resuscitate him.

I believe the pooping was more traumatic because death doesn’t smell as bad, at least not initially.

I was all over the city today shopping and running errands. I experienced much public transportation irritation.

1 train at 191st Street. Watched six uptown trains pass, during which time not a single downtown train arrived. That's always bad news because when the train eventually shows up, it is occupied by approximately the population of Guam. As this one was.

Escalator from 59th Street station to outside Time Warner Center. Everyone on escalator, including myself, groans or curses the instant he or she is elevated to street level to see` that it’s pissing down rain. And I've forgotten my umbrella. Also, my belt, which I only realize as I try to dash between the drops and my pants start falling down.

Waiting for downtown A train at 59th Street. Jazz combo playing at one end of station, with bandleader playing saxophone. Lone, crazy saxophone guy playing at other end of station. For prewalking purposes, I was waiting directly between the competing instruments. Cacophony!

Uptown 3 train, running local, and stalled between the 59th and 50th Street stations. Stuck listening to jerk quoting to his girlfriend, at length, vaguely memorized passages from the LOLCat Bible, which he kept interjecting with, “I’m telling you, Stacey, it’s the funniest thing I’ve ever read.” Then he’d quote it some more and she’d laugh weakly. Dude, you repeating it isn’t the same as me reading it. It has its moments but it’s mostly a one-joke pony, like you, Mr. Excruciating.

Subway platform monitors, photographed last night at the 86th Street station of the 1 train.

I rely of course on my sense of sight (and to a lesser yet still vital degree, smell) when navigating the cars of the New York City subway system, but I didn’t realize to what degree I relied on hearing until today.

My new headphones arrived from J&R, Panasonic RP-HTX7PP-C retro-style monitor headphones (cream-colored for extra retro-ness), kind of like the ones we kids of the ’80s wore back then to listen to educational filmstrips or language lab. They’re snug and sound-blocking, though not technically noise-cancelling.

Anyway, at the 168th Street stop of the A train, a woman rose to exit before the train had fully stopped, so I moved quickly to take her seat, didn’t hear the train’s lurching brake into the station, lost my balance and flopped gently into the lap of a random young lady in a red wool coat, who coincidentally also had on earmuff-style headphones.

When I talk while wearing these headphones, it sounds to me as if I’m under water, so I indicated via facial expression and hand gestures that I was extremely apologetic and wasn’t trying to cop a feel or anything. If it helps you to imagine the scene—and it certainly does for me—the song playing on my iPod when this all went down was Ted Nugent’s “Cat Scratch Fever.”

On my subway commute this morning, the conductor, who had a voice like warm maple syrup, consistently replaced the word “train” with “experience,” making announcements such as, “Good morning. This is a downtown A experience” and “This is a Brooklyn-bound A experience to Lefferts Boulevard.”

It improved my mood drastically for some reason.

I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.

Frank O’Hara, Meditations in an Emergency (1957)

I was standing in front of someone on the train who was talking to herself and she kept saying:

FIT... Muslims... Turkey... Airplane... Basement.

They were all part of her story but those were the only words that were intelligible and I was dying to know what she was talking about because it sounded like a fascinating story but unfortunately she was mumbling.

In light of the subway flooding last week, the mock MTA Service Alert reproduced below was making the rounds via email at work late last week. It’s clever and obviously produced by someone familiar with the vagaries of the New York City subway system.

An Important Message from the MTA

MTA New York City Transit

Service Alert

Posted on: 8/10/2007

Due to a single droplet of water falling from the sky mistaken for rain that was actually condensation from an air conditioner in a 17th floor apartment, there are delays on the following subway lines:

trains are running between 14th Street and 18th Street in both directions.

and uptown trains will terminate at 96th Street, as the conductors don’t feel like going to Harlem.

, , and trains will be making two loops around Central Park before getting you to your destination, because they need some fresh air.

trains are enjoying a hot dog and beer at Willets Point-Shea Stadium and will resume normal operation once the game is over.

, , and trains are not running at all, because they really just don’t have time for your crap today.

trains are running express in Manhattan, enjoying the nice cool breeze they get from going 30 miles an hour.

and trains are stuck in some neighborhood in Queens that you’ve never heard of.

trains are currently experiencing an inferiority complex and will not run until further notice/counseling.

, , and trains are running normally, of course, since nobody ever uses these trains.

trains are running between Princeton Junction and Hoboken. We really can’t explain how they ended up there.

and trains are currently running on the Cyclone track at Coney Island-Stillwell Ave.

and trains are feeling nostalgic right now, and are currently running over the Brooklyn Bridge.

service is suspended between Times Square-42nd Street and Grand Central-42nd Street. You can just walk. You do have legs, don’t you?

We would apologize for the inconvience, but we like to watch you suffer. Thank you for riding with MTA New York City Transit!

Storms this morning washed out the full function of nearly every line in the subway system and on the streets, irritated commuters fought for cabs and clustered among dozens waiting for full busses that didn’t stop.

My own 1 train made it downtown to 137th Street before going out of service due to flooding. After a pair of halfhearted attempts waiting for a bus, I decided to walk, and surprised myself when I was able to make the entire 100 blocks without sore feet or tiring. It took about an hour and 45 minutes, though I did stop for a cinnamon raisin bagel and some orange juice at H&H Bagels on the Upper West Side.

After work, after buying a plum-colored polo shirt from American Apparel to replace my sweaty work shirt, I met up with Andie, her coworker Ian and some of his friends at Therapy, a gay bar/lounge in Hell’s Kitchen. We were there to watch So You Think You Can Dance, which the bar broadcasts on a large screen on the second floor. Here are Andie and Ian, voguing during a commercial break.

The dancing was impressive but I think this is one of those shows that requires a long-term investment in the characters to vote accurately and consistently for the “best” dancing.

For dinner I had a turkey burger and fries, which were not bad, and two mojitos, that were also not bad but extremely expensive. I was most impressed by the fishbowl of free, elusive NYC Condoms at the door.

Therapy

• 348 W. 52nd St.
• (212) 397-1700
• Meal 33 of 52: turkey burger and fries ($11.07) and two mojitos ($18.45).

I haven’t seen many films that have been able to nail the elusive character of the prototypical hard-boiled New Yorker, that mixture of gumption, aggravation and good humor, but The Taking of Pelham One Two Three gets close. Film Forum snuck it into its “NYC Noir” five-week festival but it’s not especially noirish. First, with such snappy and funny dialogue, it’s more of a comedy. It’s not even in black and white as I had assumed but simmering with the alternately grim and garish hues of mid-’70s Manhattan, the latter best exemplified by Walter Matthau’s lemon-yellow necktie and a button-down shirt patterned in a multicolored checkerboard pattern resembling the dance floor in Saturday Night Fever.

Matthau plays a exasperated yet savvy lieutenant in the MTA’s police division whose workday takes an unexpected turn when he learns a subway car’s been hijacked and the passengers are being held for a $1 million ransom. For a film focusing mostly on this non action-packed standoff (and surprisingly little on the hostages, which are stock characters), the storyline managed to keep my attention, not only by slowly revealing how the four hijackers are planning on escaping with $1 million from a subway tunnel, but by bringing to life the city-worker characters: the salty coworkers of Matthau’s, the cranky flu-ridden mayor (the Koch-like Lee Wallace), and various cops bound by procedure and red tape.

After post-movie drinks downtown, instead of taking the subway home, which would have been only appropriate after watching perhaps the greatest New York City subway movie ever made, I took a cab, which I almost never do. I don’t recall seeing one of these before but my cab had a TV screen built into the back seat to bombard me with commercials, though at a push of the touch-screen, brought up a map that refreshed every few seconds to show the position of the cab as a green dot. Not very useful to me but mesmerizing anyway.

An article in yesterday’s New York Times (“Where Little Is Left Outside the Camera’s Eye” by Mark Landler) asserted that since the Ring of Steel, developed in response to IRA bombings of the early ’90s, video surveillance has become widely accepted in Britain, “viewed as a fact of life rather than an Orwellian intrusion.” With an estimated 4.2 million closed-circuit TV cameras in the country, a Londoner can be caught on tape hundreds of times a day, the article claims.

Then, in the paper today, a story (“New York Plans Surveillance Veil for Downtown” by Cara Buckley) reported that by the end of this year, more than 100 cameras will have started monitoring cars moving through Lower Manhattan, “the beginning phase of a London-style surveillance system that would be the first in the United States.”

If [the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative] is fully financed, it will include not only license plate readers but also 3,000 public and private security cameras below Canal Street, as well as a center staffed by the police and private security officers, and movable roadblocks.

That staff is a key difference; there are already about 250 cameras placed in high-crime areas of New York City, but that video must be downloaded; the cameras of the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative would transmit live video instantly.

Will the city approve and follow-through on this or will it end up the meaningless bleating of politicians aroused, like (apparently) that massive subway station camera campaign (strangely mentioned by neither Landler nor Buckley) that the city announced in response to the London Tube bombings of July 7, 2005?

And even if such a system were to be approved, could there ever be enough staff to track potentially thousands of live feeds? Cameras like these are really useful only in helping sift through ashes, at least until technology gets much more adept at real-time detection of “suspicious behavior,” whatever that might constitute in New York City. The cameras of London, for instance, prevented neither the Tube bombings nor the attempted car bombings last month, though they were useful in detecting suspects in the aftermath.

You emerge aboveground from the subway; now what? Which way do you walk to get back on track to your destination? It can be a problem here in New York, New York. If it’s a familiar route or neighborhood, there’s no trouble. If not, it can be tough to orient. If I’m in a rush, I’ll take one of two methods:

1. The Dirk Gently “Zen mode” of navigation: spot someone who looks as if he knows where he’s headed and follow him.
2. Or I just stride briskly in a particular direction instead of wasting time thinking about it. One in four: I like those odds.

This guy advocated stencils, which makes a lot of sense, but hasn’t caught on.

Usually it’s not that bad and there are of course tips.

If you’re the scouting sort, you can spot the sun and situate yourself that way. But not if it’s set, out of season, obscured by weather or skyscrapers, or it’s noon.

At the very least, if you’re “in the grid” in Manhattan (generally above 14th Street), you can orient yourself east-west easily because avenue blocks, which run east-west, are much wider than street blocks, which run north-south.

Often if the view is unobstructed and it’s day, you can see the street sign on the next block over. If it’s numbered, you’re set, since they increment northwardly.

Some stations label the exits underground with signage, so that you know, for instance, that you’ll be on the northeastern corner on the surface.

Looking for familiar landmarks is always a good idea, particularly tall, famous buildings. In Manhattan, looking for the Hudson or East River also helps, if you at least know you’re on the East or West Side.

Everyone has his preferred directional methods. When Jimi first moved here, he carried a small compass to know where to head upon exiting the subway. Andie has told me her method is to know which way the subway is oriented and headed, then recall that direction on the surface. This involves solving often complex spatial relations problems, particularly in larger stations with twisty passages and multiple staircases. I’ll stick with the random direction thing, which is more my forte.

October 16, 2007 Update: The New York City Department of Transportation announced today that it is adding “directional compass decals on sidewalks at subway exits in Midtown Manhattan.”

Boy, Hitch really liked stories of ordinary men in over their heads, which he never covered more realistically than in The Wrong Man. He even traded his traditional cameo for a brief introduction emphasizing his script was wholly Based on a True Story. Unfortunately that also makes it one of his least engrossing films: linear with few surprises, and, as in many Hitchcock films, dwelling on the director’s phobias and kid fears, in this case, of cops and of wrongful imprisonment. The style and cinematography, unlike most anything else Hitchcock directed, glows like a European arthouse film mixed with film noir, all downturned hats and shadows, and a vivid time capsule of a gritty New York City in 1956. Fifty years later and the bridges and the subway stations look the same.

And what better everyman to play Mr. Guilty Until Proven Innocent than Henry Fonda, a doe-eyed upstanding American with a face like a laborer in a Great Depression breadline.

Vera Miles as his wife portrays a worrisome decent into madness with a beauty you can see would have worked for Vertigo. Hitch wanted her for the role of Madeleine in that film but when she got pregnant, it went to Kim Novak.

This flyer, posted on my A train home from work tonight, reminds me that the world needs more tract-style advertisements.

After some of its usual delays, the MTA began testing subway arrival time displays in mid-January. I saw them in action today during a lunchtime jaunt to the East Side. The aim is to eventually extend this system to many more lines, but right now, it’s only active on the L, which cuts across Manhattan’s 14th Street into Brooklyn.

In at least several of the two-dozen stations on the line, small rectangular scrolling-LED signs hang above the platform. The ones at the Eighth Avenue stop weren’t working correctly, claiming arrival times of “0 Min” interspersed with this warning:

At the Union Square station they appeared to be accurate, alternating arrival times of the next two approaching trains from both the east and the west. This photo from the Third Avenue station lists “0 Min” for the Brooklyn-bound train I just exited and notes another will arrive in nine minutes.

I will admit there is a certain comfort in knowing when your train will show up. For instance, knowing it will be, say, 10 minutes would allow you to temporarily sneak up or over to one of those underground newsstands to stand on line for a bag of Doritos or something. And if your platform is above-ground, in inclement weather it’d be helpful to know you could hide out in the shelter and warmth of the station until your train pulls in.

Conceivably, these signs would alert straphangers to big delays on the line; if you’re running late for something important, it’d be invaluable to know your train won’t be appearing anytime soon and you’d be better off cabbing it. Finally, once they install signage like this on lines that have local and express trains running across the platform from one another, it will be useful to check whether you’ll save time exiting the local and waiting to pick up the express.

I’m keen to see how this system will unfold and bring the MTA up to speed with the world’s other big public transit systems. Major cities I’ve visited in the past 12 months—Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Dublin and Rome—already have subway arrival time displays very similar to New York’s test version.

On the way back uptown from Megan’s birthday soirée.

The MTA encourages conductors to stick to its script. Guidelines require basic announcements when the doors of a subway car are open in a station, including the line, station name and any transfer points. Conductors are permitted to add brief scripted niceties and PSAs: “stand clear of the closing doors,” “the time is now [time],” “thank you for riding MTA, New York City Transit,” “keep an eye on your belongings at all times,” etc. They can also announce delays and their cause.

But every so often, you’ll get a conductor who flexes this policy, mixing up the language to lend a personal touch, or, my favorite, add color commentary, capping stop announcements with a brief note of highlights at street level. Some stops always get this qualifier, but only the iconic ones: “42nd Street, Times Square” and “34th Street, Penn Station,” for example. But to lend a qualifier to most every stop is rare. Since living here, I remember hearing a conductor do this only once, on the 1 train. She offered shopping tips all the way up the West Side, saying things like “79th Street, Filene’s Basement, Circuit City.”

The conductor of my A train home tonight did much the same. He sounded suspiciously like Mars Blackmon and I noticed upon exiting that he sported a flattop. Here’s what he said for each stop:

• “59th, Columbus Circle, Time-Warner Center.”
• “125th, home of the world-, world-, world-famous Apollo Theater.”
• “145th, Sugar Hill.”
• “168th, the hospital.”
• “175th, George Washington Bridge Bus Terminal.”
• “181st.”
• “190th, Overlook Terrace, a.k.a. The Cloisters.”
• “Dyckman.”

As you can see, poor 181st Street, as well as my home stop, Dyckman, got the short shrift. (For Dyckman, I’d have mentioned the underrated Fort Tryon Park). This conductor made me wish I’d entered his train much further down the line so I could have heard what he had to say about stops like Canal, 4th and 14th.

Commuters are conditioned to hear familiar announcements repeatedly from conductors, so unscripted deviations like these can be jarring. Mostly though, when the commentary is different and briefly informative, it reminds me that travel here is never a line on a map but a connection of dots curious and noteworthy.

What the 10 people standing or seated nearest me on the uptown A train were reading around 9 p.m. today:

1. woman with glasses perched atop head: paperback of Gilead: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson.
2. girl with Emily Dickinson hair and a scarf striped like a roll of mixed berry LifeSavers: grimly designed hardcover of 31 Days: The Crisis That Gave Us the Government We Have Today by Barry Werth.
3. grandmotherly type: article in current issue of New York magazine: “What Is That For? A Visual Guide to Some of Chinatown’s More-Intriguing Ingredients.”
4. guy with a Crate & Barrel bag containing a Cuisinart programmable coffeemaker: a chapbook entitled Saved.
5. shifty eyed guy in paint-spattered cargo pants: laser-printed copes of emails.
6. fidgety woman: fidgeting so much I couldn’t even read the title of her book. Something like Trivial Secret or Rival Secret, with a florescent green cover.
7. woman with curly hair: a stapled-together photocopy of an Alice Munro short story, the words on the inner edge of the copied pages falling into the shadow cast by the book’s binding.
8. Japanese girl: a yellowing paperback, printed in Japanese, with a woodcut illustration of a bunch of grapes on the front (back?) cover.
9. nerdy guy: what appeared to be a magazine article by Stephen King called “The Secret Garden” (which is weird, because I thought that was a novella he published back in 1990).
10. guy in expensive gray pants carrying New York Sports Club tote: alternately reading a tiny spiral-bound notebook and writing in it.

It’s about time! Within the past two days or so, Google silently added New York City subway station stops to Google Maps, visible at the three most zoomed-in views of the city. Here’s an example from Lower Manhattan.

Microsoft’s MSN Maps & Directions site, also known as MapBlast, has had this feature for years and it bugged me greatly that Google would futz around with monumental eye-candy like Google Earth when they were missing such a basic, essential aspect of their NYC maps. Barring copyright issues, now they only need to add the correctly numbered/lettered and colored line logos instead of the generic white-on-blue “metro stop” icons they’re using now.

A cheeky hooligan replaced part of one of the regulation “don’t do it” sticker-signs on an A train I took this afternoon. Normally, from left to right, the pictograms indicate “no smoking,” “no littering” and “no boomboxing.”

This edit of the sticker, barely clear in my blurry no-flash photo, seems to indicate, from left to right, “no smoking,” “no pooing” and “no big butts.”

Someone was struck and killed by a subway train just before 7 a.m. today at the 59th Street/Columbus Circle Station, a possible suicide that caused folks on my line considerable trouble getting into work this morning.

My train slowed to a crawl then stopped around 103rd Street. The conductor kept repeating the announcement, “Because of a passenger requiring medical attention at the 59th Street Station, we are experiencing heavy delays,” probably because that sounded better than, “Some guy just got juiced by a subway!”

The MTA then decided everyone had to exit the 1/2/3 trains because they were no longer operating between 96th and 59th streets. What a mess. At the major intersections on Broadway and thereabouts were masses of impatient commuters waiting for already packed busses and cabs. I thought about walking over to the B or C on Central Park West but I imagined everyone had that idea and, regardless, those lines go through 59th Street Station, too. So I decided to hoof it. The weather was brisk but the exercise was refreshing.

There should be (if there isn’t already) a New York subway bingo game featuring squares for all the crazy stuff you can witness as a passenger, because all of a sudden today, I had two brand new subway experiences.

The first was guy-on-my-car-collared-by-a-cop, which I’d nearly experienced before, although it was guy-arrested-right-outside-my-car-for-pushing-a-woman-onto-the-tracks (she was O.K.). The best part was this cretin got pinched for attempting to board a jam-packed 1 train at 66th Street by leaping the safety gates between two cars. That’s a spectacularly bad idea because although people will do this when the train’s stopped, it’s possible the train will start moving again before they’re done clambering. Just last week, some idiot was pulped in this way. The guy on my train made it on board, but he neglected to account that he did so in plain view of the token booth clerk. A small, scrappy woman, she burst out and started shouting at him, causing a cop to materialize from seemingly nowhere and barge into my car. Of course, now that the suspect was on an ultra-crowded train, he had nowhere to go. The cop grabbed him with ease and drug him off, yelling, “You know how stupid that is?”

My other new subway experience happened very late on the uptown 1 train. I entered a half-empty car with joy, which goes to show you I’m not quite a New Yorker. I quickly realized my mistake. There’s almost never a catch-free half-empty subway car; likely, there’s Something Bad in there, such as:

• no heat in winter
• full heat in summer
• ranting lunatic
• lurking pervert
• gang of hoodlums
• shrieking baby
• obnoxious teens
• stinky bum
• stupendously bad odor in general
• extremely loud or malfunctioning loudspeaker
• large flying insect

In my case tonight, it was a fresh puddle of puke on the floor.

It was brown, chunky and didn’t smell that bad, but it had cleared half the car. I sat across from it because I was sleepy and I like end seats, bodily waste be damned. It was fun to watch people stride on board only to stop in their tracks with disgust as they spotted the ralph. One guy walking through the car didn’t even notice until he’d trod through it, then had to angrily shake off his sullied sneaker while nearly slipping with his other.

It was chilly this morning and I had my light coat on. Though shivery, I nodded off on the subway. When I woke up, the car was full and I was sandwiched between two plump women in the seats on either side of me. It was a warm and toasty feeling that I didn’t want to leave behind, just like those mornings these days when you’re cocooned in covers and want to stay there when the alarm goes off.

It’s another exciting video quiz featuring exterior station signage for the 1/9 and 2/3 New York City subway lines! Similar to the previous subway signage quiz, each image below is from a movie and it’s your duty to determine which. You’ll have to trust me that the symbols of the 1/2/3/9 are just visible through the falling snow in the upper-left corner of the first screencap and that the out-of-focus entrance sign in the background of the second screencap reads “Franklin St. Station.”

My electrical-engineer dad would have enjoyed the tour I took today as part of the annual Open House New York weekend. It was of IRT Substation #13, designed to generate power for the New York City subway and one of the oldest.

It opened in 1904, the same year as the first subway. The mayor, governor and, apocryphally, Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, among other dignitaries, arrived at the substation-warming party in horse-drawn buggies.

Old #13 has operated continuously since and today powers the 1 line, which old-timers still call the IRT. Although it houses sinister-looking modern equipment, the substation serves as a de facto museum because it contains original machinery, the centerpiece of which is the Westinghouse 1,500 kilowatt rotary converter. Incredibly, this 50-ton wheel didn’t go offline until 1999.

Our guide, a chief overseer of the city’s transit substations with the foresworn duty “to preserve our electrical history,” as he said, was an amiable bearded fellow by the name of Bob. It was big of Bob, a 37-year MTA veteran, to even give the tour because about the same time it started, a building in Corona, Queens collapsed, narrowly taking a chunk of the 7 line with it, so he likely had other matters on his mind.

Bob used a lot of electrical-engineer talk, but as a seasoned guide he let the kids on the tour flip old switches and offered everyone entertaining bits of trivia. One of these, confirmed by MythBusters, is that it’s safe to pee on the electrified third rail of the subway track, but only if you’re more than six feet away, as one of the show’s hosts learned the hard way.

We were also told those blue lights in subway tunnels mark the location of an emergency power switch. Anyone can pull it to deactivate the third rail, a potentially lifesaving maneuver if someone falls or leaps to the tracks. Bob said these oft-fatal actions happen much more often than you’d think: two or three times a day. You only read about them in the Post when they involve a pretty white person or are particularly gristly.

The substation is located on West 53rd Street, directly behind the Ed Sullivan Theater, where the entire back wall and stage floor are grounded to shield Dave and his guests from electrocution.

Here’s a back corner of the substation where the walls bristle with old-fashioned signals, switches and signage.

Nearby, Bob demonstrated where workers could light cigarettes on exposed bits of metal coursing with 600 volts. After checking with someone over his walkie-talkie, he popped an active circuit breaker (13F11, if you’re keeping track at home), an action that arrives with a heartstopping BANG.

This guy sitting right next to me on the 1 train this morning was wearing English Leather cologne. He wasn’t marinated in it, but the scent had reached that tipping point between pleasant and noticeable. Given all the other New York-style odors he could have been emanating, I fell back asleep unperturbed to halting dreams of acid-washed jean jackets and Ocean Pacific T-shirts, for you see, I once regularly wore English Leather myself. I thought I was the bee’s knees, but I was in seventh grade and also thought Def Leppard was the bee’s knees.

Later I recalled a report in Monday’s London Independent that the UK drugstore chain Superdrug is reviving so-called “heritage scents” such as Brut, Old Spice and Hi Karate for those gents who “embrace all things retro in an effort to smell like their parents did three decades ago.” I’ve always thought scents like these were for four certain groups of males:

1. Old people.
2. Kids.
3. Those with worse odors to hide.
4. Gentlemen from New Jersey who favor black leather jackets, hairgel, a plug of gum to chew and a free Friday evening during which to barhop and talk loudly in the West Village.

The way I look at it these days is that, in general, soap, shampoo, deodorant, shaving cream and toothpaste are already scented, so why must one add another smell to the fantasia?

Yes, yes, I can hear your protestations: “What about the ladies, Jason?” you are shouting at your computer screen. I have no problem with ladies wearing the occasional pleasing scent, because your average lady knows about portion control. A man given a bottle of cologne will go too far. (This is true with many objects and men. Paintball guns, for example.)

Masculine fragrance dispensers should be required by law to administer only a certain amount of fragrance over a given time, like a morphine drip, to prevent overapplication and the near-literal appearance of wavy odor lines radiating from the subject. You can’t expect your average guy to know how much cologne is enough when we have enough trouble picking out our clothing.

With nerdy excitement, I rode home from work tonight on an R160B subway car. It’s a new model that’s being “revenue test”-driven this month, so I consider myself lucky for the preview.

Peering down the track¹ at Penn Station, I noticed the train’s difference from most others before it even arrived. On the engine car, the R160B sports a glossy black fiberglass faceplate, yoke-shaped and reminiscent of certain cellphone designs. Very modern looking, for now. (View a photo here.)

What grabbed my attention once inside the car was the FIND (Flexible Information and Notice Display) System, a LED strip map that shows the rider’s relation to the next several stations (i.e. a graphical indication that a rider will arrive at Dyckman Street in two stops), as well as any route changes. I think the design is confusing; decide for yourself by viewing these photos. Each car has two (or was it three?) of these maps and they’re flanked by an LCD TV screen cycling basic route information with house commercials and static ads for the MTA. These screens were what really grabbed my attention for two reasons.

The first has to do with logos and design. Some background: older subway cars, which still make up most of New York’s fleet, have the line logo (i.e. the white-“A”-in-a-blue-circle logo for the A train) displayed on the face of the engine car and on the outside of all cars, usually via a low-tech rotatable backlit transparency. The newer cars, including the R160B, don’t have any “permanent” signage; inside and out, it’s nothing but LCD or LED screens. This makes sense. In effect, the MTA is moving even closer to creating a universal subway car that can run on any line², merely changing all signage, as well as interior maps and line details, electronically.

A side effect of this is that the system’s colorful and iconic signage, which I wrote about late last year, seems in danger of disappearing from the cars. But wait: an interesting thing about the LCD screens inside the R160B is that they occasionally depicted a computer-generated white-“A”-in-a-blue-circle logo. Everything old is new again! Vignelli’s ’60s design makes it to the digital age!

The second attention-grabbing aspect of the screens is obvious. The MTA, with its perpetual budget woes, is all about generating revenue. I bet it added the screens with the eventual intent of broadcasting commercials. What advertiser wouldn’t want an audience as captive and diverse as one packed into a New York City subway car at rush hour?

¹ As any New Yorker will tell you, this makes your train arrive faster. [back]

² This isn’t wholly accurate. The lines of the New York City subway system originate from a patchwork of styles and eras. Cars on the lettered lines, for example, are longer and wider than those on numbered lines; the two groups aren’t interchangeable. But it was easier to refer to a universal subway car than it was to interrupt the flow by explaining stuff like I just did here. [back]

Subway stations here house some of the most intriguing found art in the city. Many stations have these refrigerator-door-sized frames on the walls inside for paste-up posters promoting movies, TV shows and consumer goods. They’re torn down, layered over and defaced, and between postings resemble modern collage. There will often be a dash of pop art present, as in the second poster shown here with its Bud ad fragment.

Pop quiz, hotshot: Can you name the source of these three screengrabs, each featuring exterior station signage for the 1/9 2/3 New York City subway lines?

Hint: each image is from a commercially produced video source, so I’m not putting up anything too obscure. Challenge: as you can see, when widescreen screengrabs are proportionally scaled to my blog-standard image width, they gain the size and quality of a Bazooka Joe comic.

I had to cross the bay this afternoon for a meeting in Oakland, California, and I was all set to tackle the BART card-vending machines with renewed vigor. In San Francisco, like in D.C. (but unlike flat-fee New York), you pay for your subway ride based on its length. This requires you to put a little thought into how much money you should put on your card because the machines only return a low amount of maximum change.

When I entered the Montgomery Street BART/MUNI station, all of the farecard slots were taped over with blue stickers and the electronic turnstiles were open. Signs announced a “Spare the Air Day,” which I later learned was heat-induced—apparently, 84 degrees is really hot for the city.

According to a San Francisco Chronicle article, the free rides were to lure commuters away from their cars onto public transportation to avoid exceeding state and federal smog standards. Although transit officials said the campaign drew “significant numbers of new passengers to some systems,” it didn’t sway enough to avoid tipping the smog scale, likely to 90ppb (parts per billion) of emissions for today; the federal ozone standard maxes-out at 80ppb. Hey, at least they’re tryin’.

There was a bum who was literally urine-soaked, slumped unconscious or asleep on the express train this morning, which made me think of that old New York adage, “Better a urine-soaked bum than one who smells like a dog that's rolled around in its own poo.”

The air conditioning in the car was rumbling full blast, so the odor wasn't too pungent, but it was funny watching commuters stride confidently aboard the half-empty car at 72nd Street and Times Square, then suddenly realize why it was half-empty, as they scritched up their noses and scanned the crowd with a frown to see who was responsible for the olfactory malfeasance.

A passenger sitting near where I was standing had his handkerchief clutched to his face, and there was like a six-foot danger zone radiating from the bum's perch that was wordlessly deemed too smelly and off limits.

Although the phrase sounds to be an oxymoron, there are five above-ground subways stations in Manhattan, according to nycsubway.org.

1. West 125th Street (1 line)
2. Dyckman Street (1 line)
3. West 207th Street (1 line)
4. West 215th Street (1 line)
5. East 148th Street (3 line)

They’re much more popular in the outer boroughs, but a rarity here in the city, where my home stop is one of them.

As you’d expect, there are downsides to stations outdoors. Cold weather or precipitation are not fun when enclosures or overhead coverage are minimal. There are more stairs to climb, although straphangers using the West 125th Street station get off easy with a pair of tremendously tall and narrow escalators. And as with the University Circle stop on the Red Line of the Greater Cleveland RTA Rapid System, I am distressed when I can see myself miss a train from blocks away, although I’m not sure why; unlike in Cleveland, another train here will arrive quickly, typically within five minutes.

On the other hand, it’s relaxing to bask in the sun and fresh air of an outdoor station when the weather’s agreeable, instead of lurking about a dim, urine-scented vault. You can look out over your neighborhood or directly into adjoining top-story apartment windows, if you’re some sort of pervert. From my station, I can see the train approach from about three-quarters of a mile away. At night, I can spot whitish-blue sparks of light bounce off distant buildings when the train’s wheels scrape the tracks, just before it rumbles into view, like lightning preceding thunder.

Samantha’s birthday was today, so her husband Iggy arranged a surprise get-together for her at Japas 55 with a tight-knit group of friends and a birthday karaoke celebration, with plenty of gifts, sushi, sake and beer to go around. We started out, appropriately enough, with “Birthday” by the Beatles, quickly discovering, as most have, that we only knew the refrain. (Even more embarrassingly, this happened with Europe’s “Final Countdown,” which I don’t think anyone actually knows the verses to.)

Surprisingly, neither Billy Joel nor Zeppelin made appearances at our party, but we pulled out what are by now, after several karaoke outings featuring most of the same singers, traditional group favorites:

• “Love Shack” by the B-52’s
• “Bette Davis Eyes” by Kim Carnes
• “Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now)” by Phil Collins
• “Hotel California” by the Eagles
• “Suspicious Minds” by Elvis
• “We Built This City” by Starship
• requisite David Bowie song (“Modern Love”)
• requisite Madonna song (“Like a Virgin”)

We also snuck into the ’60s with “California Dreamin’” by the Mamas & the Papas, “Hazy Shade of Winter” by Simon & Garfunkel and “Daydream Believer” by the Monkees. My shining moment was helping out Katie with the lead for U2’s “One,” which wasn’t a problem, because Bono’s range is nearly as limited as mine.

Sam has a clear, strong, beautiful voice, and can really hold down a tune, so we faded back as she took the lead on “Only The Lonely” by the Motels, “You’ve Got a Friend” by Carole King, “We’ve Only Just Begun” (if memory serves) by the Carpenters, and, oddly but successfully, “Land of Confusion” by Genesis and “If I Only Had a Brain” from The Wizard of Oz. Hooray for karaoke!

My ride home was a barrel of monkeys. You must give credit to the Metropolitan Transit Authority for waiting until the wee hours after midnight to conduct trackwork and construction. Alas, while the number of riders to be inconvenienced is vastly diminished at that time, those riders that there are tend to be very sleepy, drunk or both, making navigation of already confusing rerouting directives and temporary service cancellations moreso.

In my case, the A express train uptown was running on the local track at 59th Street, so I instead took the D express train, exercising care to get off at 145th Street, lest I end up in the Bronx. I then transferred to another A train, also running on the local track, and at 168th Street, to the grumbles of many, the conductor announced that was the train’s final stop.

Then there was an announcement over the PA that the only way to access uptown express stops on the A (like my home stop) was to take a local shuttle train running on the downtown express track. But when it pulled up and its passengers has departed, the conductor shouted to keep off because his particular train was headed back to the station. Neon-vested MTA grunts had to make a sweep of the still-open cars to shoo out the stubborn, the non-English-comprehending and the hard of hearing.

With a sigh, I took an elevator down to the fifth circle of hell, land of the Wrathful, Sullen and 1 train, which after taking a long while to show up, eventually got me home by 2:30 a.m. Yet, as recently demonstrated, subway service is better than none.

I met the rosy-fingered dawn to get another overpriced livery cab, this time to LaGuardia Airport for my flight home to Cleveland for Christmas. (Later in the day, I learn that as of 3 p.m., the strike has ended, which will make for a much easier and cheaper trip home and a resumption of normalcy to my transit life.)

I went out on one of my usual used CD expeditions in Rocky River and Lakewood, and while I was in the area, stopped by the offices of my previous employers, ProPress.

My ex-boss Steve regalled me with stories of the airplane model-maker clubs he’s joined, and provided commentary while showing me a video he produced on his and Teresa’s trip to Thailand.

After work last night, I walked all the way up to West 103rd Street before I was able to get an available cab that was willing to take me home, and I think the driver only agreed because he didn’t know until it was too late that Dyckman is so far uptown.

This morning, I took another livery cab in to work. I’m aggravated that I’m pissing away money on this strike; most livery vehicles in my neighborhood are charging a flat fee of $15 or $20. And speaking of money, do you know how much these yahoos make? Under their current contracts, both subway operators and bus drivers earn about $62,500 (including overtime) a year, train conductors average $53,000 and subway booth clerks make $50,720, according to MTA estimates published today by Bloomberg News. And under the new contract being offered by the MTA, an average 3.5% raise each year through 2008. Gee, that’s rough.

Traffic has gotten both better and worse. Better, because commuters are more adjusted to the conventions of the situation. Worse, because everyone that didn’t think of it yesterday is now attempting to take non-striking trains in to work, like the Metro North. A coworker told me yesterday I should just take a cab to the Metro North station at 125th Street and take the train in to Penn Station, saving money and avoiding traffic jams. But I’ve read of hour and a half waits just to get tickets and Penn has never been so packed, to the point that people have had trouble entering and exiting; one person told WNBC the station experience was “like being in the mosh pit of a Metallica concert.”

Because of my isolated location, I’ve determined my best bet is to continue relying on livery cabs. The ones in my neighborhood have taken to congregating across the street from the Dyckman/200th Street station of the 1 train, and commuters have gotten used to the “4 people per vehicle” recruitment pitch, roaming the sidewalks and asking random passers-by, “You need a ride? You goin’ downtown?”

The driver and three other guys that piled in with me this morning were less chatty than yesterday’s group, but spoke in Spanish when they did, so I was in conversational darkness again. The driver, who was understandably cranky about the traffic, emitted strings of what I assume were curses and outbursts of exasperation, which contrasted strangely with Andy Williams on the all-Christmas-music radio station, singing about the most wonderful time of the year, a sentiment surely held in doubt by the vehicle’s fares and a few million other New Yorkers.

Despite getting snared in the same East Side gridlock as yesterday, as well as picking up additional passengers along our route as others disembarked, it only took an hour and a half to get to work. I miss my subway, with its cheapness and reliability.

The union and management of the Metropolitan Transit Authority have been rumbling over contract negotiations for a week, and have made scant progress, so the union finally called a walkout at 3 a.m., leaving seven million subway and bus passengers without transit, myself included. It’s the first MTA strike since 1980. Pity I’ve now moved too far uptown to sensibly walk to work anymore.

I walked over to the Dyckman/W. 200th St. station for the 1 train just to see what was cooking. Inside the station, a web of hot pink plastic tape was wrapped around the turnstile gates as if to say, “We’re on strike! No entry! Time to party!” Outside, there was a clot of people wandering around, pondering their options.

Two of them sidled up to me, a cute 20-something Spanish chick and a short middle-aged Spanish guy, and kindly recruited me for carpool purposes. To explain: weekdays during the strike, between 5 and 11 a.m., the city is disallowing vehicles with fewer than three paying passengers to venture below 96th Street. In other words, it’s “buddy up,” or you’re out of luck, buddy. We were able to snag a black livery cab in about 10 minutes, using a combination of waving and gestures meant to indicate that we were indeed a party of three and we were ready to be seated.

Our driver saddled that fine New York line between “ballsy” and “maniac,” taking freshly-changed red lights as mere suggestions to stop, lurching from lane to lane while speeding for better position, and plenty of horn action. He spoke rapidly and jocularly in Spanish with the other two passengers. At one point, the girl apologized to me for them speaking in Spanish; I wasn’t offended and said no apology was necessary. I did ask what they were talking about, and apparently it was just jokes about the traffic and the strike. Whatever the specifics, the girl kept laughing, agreeing and saying, “Oh dios mío!”

She was destined for East 70th Street and Second Avenue, so the driver expertly stairstepped over to the East Side, going down Adam Clayton-Powell Blvd., cutting over to Malcom X Blvd., then over to Fifth Avenue. As promised, at 96th Street there was a police checkpoint that was bottlenecking traffic. After a visual spot check, we were waved through. At East 84th, the driver, mid-anecdote, nearly slammed into a shouting human wall of NYPD, who were pointing vigorously east, disallowing further access down Fifth. Without much of a choice, we shifted over to Park Avenue, where traffic had slowed to a crawl. After we had advanced only one block in 15 minute, the girl paid her fare and got out to walk the rest of her way. It was clear traffic wouldn’t be improving anytime soon, so I gave up at E. 79th, paid my driver with thanks and a $20 bill, and began walking.

A news report in the car had noted it was 26 degrees, but that it felt like 11 with the wind chill. I’d say that was about right. I cut over to Madison, one of several closed streets (except for the stray school bus and emergency vehicle), and it was eerie for a main artery to have almost no traffic at rush hour. The only sounds were footsteps echoing off the buildings and helicopters hovering low in the distance.

I stopped at the Hilton New York near Rockefeller Center for a restroom break and marveled at the horribly long cab lines. I ended up getting to work at 11 a.m., two hours late. The office was fuller than I expected, but most of my coworkers live upstate or in New Jersey, where transport hasn’t been directly affected.

In 1998, a writer for The New York Times Sunday Magazine asked John C. Waddell, a Museum of Modern Art curator, what he’d like to acquire as the epitome of modern design: his choice was the signage for the city’s subway system.

“When I think of the East Side, it’s green; when I think of Lincoln Center, it’s red,” Waddell said, referring to the 4/5/6 and 1 lines, respectively depicted as green and red on the MTA’s New York City Subway Map. “Massimo and Lella Vignelli did that to my head.”

Born in Italy, the Vignellis moved to New York in the 1950s and in 1965, Massimo co-founded the design studio Unimark International. Only a year later, the firm was commissioned to design maps and signage for the subway. The MTA map circa 1966/1967 (depicted below) was the first to show each train route in a separate color, but despite Waddell’s comment, it’s not entirely clear Massimo himself chose the colors for the system. If he did, though, it’s astounding that an individual could be responsible for a collective memory.

I’ve seen at least one New York City guidebook that referred to the subway’s “green line” or “yellow line,” a misguided and oversimplified way to educate tourists or others new to the system—most often, trains with differing destinations run on a single colored line. Instead, the lines are correctly referred to by their associated letters or numbers.

But I admit to the feeling of geography associated with a line’s color that Waddell describes. Because of where I live now and before, and where I work, the red (1/2/3) and blue (A/C/E) lines color most of the city for me. Red still chiefly conjures the Upper West Side, while blue runs the gamut from my current neighborhood, down through Central Park West, Greenwich Village, all the way to JFK Airport. There is another, more oblique red-and-blue association; looking at the two colors wend their way through the boroughs on the map reminds me of the cat I dissected in Mr. Dewey’s high school bio class, the blood vessels injected with colored latex, red for arteries and blue for veins.

Other colors I associate with areas of the city are the green line (4/5/6), appropriately matched with the well-moneyed Upper East Side, and the bright tangle of gold (N/R/Q/W) and orange (B/D/F/V) at the bustling core of Manhattan and the Lower East Side. The shuttle to Times Square (the S), the shortest and straightest route in the system, is appropriately a brief, slate-gray slash, with the lighter gray L cutting a swath lower across Manhattan and hooking into Brooklyn.

New Yorkers adapted well enough to the sudden bursts of color in their commutes, but by the mid-1970’s, there was enough hubbub over the not-based-to-scale aspect of the new map that it was redesigned to the more geographically accurate style used today. A typical flap over Massimo’s map: See the rounded tan square in the left-center? That’s Central Park, which is in reality closer in aspect ratio to a golden rectangle.

Although Massimo’s map may have been ultimately maligned as a victim of design over function, his subway signage has stayed more or less the same, with a letter or number in the Helvetica-mimic typeface Standard Medium boldly punctuating a circle. (For the station-name lettering, one big change was to reverse-out Massimo’s black-on-white lettering, shown in his 1966 illustration above, in order to discourage graffiti.)

And the colors remain, the most memorized design, intentionally or otherwise, in New York City.

Looks like New York got punk’d by Iraq on the whole subway-specific terror threat on Friday, according to news from CNN this afternoon (“Sources: Tip on N.Y. Subway Threat a Hoax,” by Kelli Arena):

Information that led to heightened security for the New York City transit system was a hoax, government sources said Tuesday.

The sources said an informant in Iraq who provided the tip had told investigators about a terrorist plot involving New York’s subway system. That informant admitted he gave false information, the sources said.

I suppose Iraq is entitled to give us some good-natured ribbing of this sort, especially so close to the tricks and treats of Halloween, and we did kind of start it with that whole invade-their-country thing.

But might I suggest Los Angeles get picked on next time? Look, they’re a huge, all-American city rife with landmarks and symbolism, and populated by infidels and smug twats, just like New York, only with tans and better teeth. How about some terror over there next time? We could all use a rest here.

For the first time, according to media reports, terrorists have directly targeted New York City’s subway system with threats of a bombing, possibly one modeled on those that took place in London this summer. Here’s a summary from an article in today’s Times (“New York Named in Terror Threat Against Subways,” by William K. Rashbaum):

Information about the threat, the officials said, came to light last weekend from an intelligence source who told federal authorities that the three men in Iraq had planned to meet with other operatives in New York.

One official said the group would number about a dozen. Another official said the total was closer to 20 people involved. The men planned to use strollers, briefcases and packages to hide a number of bombs that they planned to detonate on the subways.

“It was a conspiracy involving more than a dozen people aimed at delivering a number of devices into the subway,” one of the officials said.

The attack could happen as early as today or later this month, the officials added. Mayor Bloomberg announced at a press conference yesterday that he was immediately stepping up security, including the random bag searches implemented in July, and told New Yorkers to keep on straphangin’ but to be watchful for any suspicious activity. “If you see something, say something,” he repeated.

On the other hand, Russ Knocke, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, labeled the threat “specific but noncredible” and said there are no plans to alter the threat level either in New York or the nation. The Los Angeles Times even quoted him today as having said, “The intelligence community has concluded this intelligence is of doubtful credibility.” What? Let’s get on the same page, politicos. Now I’m left to wonder if Bloomie’s announcement wasn’t at least in part politically motivated, kind of like our current presidential administration’s shenanigans with the national, color-coded terror alert system.

Lunchtime Update: Oh, great, a bomb scare at Penn Station. According to AFX News, law enforcement officials in biohazard suits, National Guard troops and police with bomb-sniffing dogs were called in this morning to investigate a suspicious substance that had been reported in a soft-drink can near an Amtrak ticketing area. It turned out to be a Drano-like liquid: a false alarm. I also just read that Bloomberg made a show of taking the subway to work this morning, in a gesture to reassure us commuters; hey, I got your gesture right here, buddy. Finally, police are now telling commuters here for the first time to refrain from bringing along backpacks, baby strollers, briefcases or bags, all of which could be used to hide explosives. I think I’ll sigh and walk home from work today.

Yesterday, the Metropolitan Transit Authority passed new conduct rules and penalties for subway riders, adding them to an already extensive list. It reminds me of those obscure laws that no one follows, much less knows anything about.

The MTA kept in place an existing ban on open containers (of any beverage, not just malt liquor) and approved a new $25 fine on the activity. The newly adopted rules include a ban on moving between subway cars and taking up more than one seat.

The beverage fine has got folks in an tizzy, rightfully so I think, because it affects those law-abiding citizens who enjoy coffee during their morning commute or water on a hot day, not to mention those who appear to be enjoying a full picnic lunch from the confine of their seat.

The moving-between-cars one is a mixed blessing. Sometimes it’s a relief to escape a crowded car or one that has no heat in winter, no air conditioning in the summer or a mysterious odor. Then again, as every New Yorker knows, most of the time when someone’s switching cars, it’s a beggar or street musician making the rounds, so maybe this rule is a disguised attempt to harass these sores on society’s ass. (That three-piece harmonizing mariachi band that occasionally pops up on the 1 train is exempt from my generalization.)

The one-seat rule will be tough to enforce because of the fat, the burly and the sleepy, not to mention the Surly Man standard of sitting with legs splayed wide enough that you could easily fit one of those plastic children’s wading pools in there.

It’s laughable the MTA would waste time and money formulating these rules, as they’ll likely be loosely enforced—so far this year, for instance, only about 30 tickets have been issued for the beverage ban, according to NY1. Also, riders tend to ignore even the rules that are posted, much less the ones only in the books. We’re not supposed to lean on the subway doors, but we do, and we happily hog the seats labeled as reserved for the handicapped and infirm.

But New Yorkers are keeping an eye on the MTA. Last summer, it tried to sneak in a ban of photography on New York trains, cities and buses, as well as in the stations, which would have dissolved some beautiful sites and a fun passtime. In this case, the photographic, civil liberty-lovin’ and blogging communities raised holy hell and the proposal was dropped. Now let them get to work on that beverage ban.

I was catching up on all the local news that went down while I was away. As you might guess, the one that irritated me the most was the August 23 announcement that the city would saturate the subway system with “1,000 video cameras and 3,000 motion sensors.” To leaven the Big Brotherness of it all, they’re throwing the unwashed masses a bone: cellphone service in 277 underground stations (but not on the subway itself), to ease efforts in calling 911 in case of emergency. I guarantee you, legitimate calls to 911 will be 0.01% of the calls; the others will be people calling other people saying, “Oh, nothing. Waiting for the subway. Where you at?” and more-important-than-you people in suits that start trembling like crack addicts without their little hands-free call device.

But at the center of the effort

will be a dense network of cameras that can zoom, pivot and rotate, all while transmitting and recording images of sensitive areas, from dark tunnels under the East River to bustling subway platforms in Midtown. Each camera will capture distances up to 300 feet and will cost about $1,200. A selected location could have 2 to 30 cameras.

The cameras, supplied by military-favored corporation Lockheed Martin, are “intelligent video” systems in that they’re operated by software that can differentiate between moving people on a subway platform and a “suspicious” stationary object, like an unattended suitcase or a bag lady, sending off an alert to police. I think the best we can hope for from any camera system isn’t preventative, but to get some smudgy color photos of the infidels who just killed themselves and a bunch of subway passengers, like in the London bombings.

In reference to the exciting subway bag searches, some cheeky fellow defaced this NYPD recruitment poster at the 49^th Street station for uptown N and R trains by penning “You too can be a subway bag checker!” Not quite visible in my photo, someone added underneath, “The 4^th Amendment is not really that important. Get over it!”

Strange that my subway line (the 1), which as I wrote in April was rated the dirtiest in the city, has just been rated the overall best line in the city, according to an article in today’s Newsday that cites the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s annual rider survey.

The 1,210 riders polled rated the 5 line, which is like the East Side counterpart to the West Side’s 1 line, the city’s worst, chiefly because of crowding. In fact, crowding was singled-out as the worst aspect of the subway, with other big gripes including cleanliness, homeless people and stazzzxt annzzzztxskt (station announcements). The most positive ratings were reserved for conductors’ courtesy, safety and temperatures inside cars.

On average, survey respondents gave the system a grade of C-, the same as 1994. On the bright side, if there really is such a thing underground, the grade is better than it was in 1984, when riders smacked the system with a big fat F. Of course, at that time, crime, graffiti and Bernard Goetz were running rampant, and subway cars broke down every 5,000 miles, according to the MTA. Now, crime is way down and Bernie is running for public office, people are riding the subway in numbers unseen since the ’50s, and cars break down only once every 140,000 miles or if you’re running extremely late for work, whichever comes first.

O, New York subway system. Will you ever win?

As might have been expected, today the New York Civil Liberties Union sued the city over its new practice of searching the bags of subway passengers, despite reports that the public doesn’t seem to be resisting.

ACLU: Fourth Amendment rights violation and “unlikely to have any meaningful deterrent effect on terrorist activity”!

NYC: The searches meet all legal requirements, preserving “the important balance between protecting our city and preserving individual rights”!

Who will win? Stay tuned.

P.S. Amusing New York-vs.-the-rest-of-the-world bit about the searches in the “Letters of the Week” section of this week’s Village Voice:

Editor’s note: Chisun Lee’s article about Tony Lu, an immigrant rights activist who designed T-shirts declaring his objection to the new random bag search policy in New York’s transit systems [“NYers to NYPD: ‘I Do Not Consent to Being Searched,’ ” July 21, villagevoice.com], received an extraordinary response from readers. Nearly all disagreed with Lu’s protest, many were angry, and some voiced their opinions in the most extreme terms. At deadline, the Voice had not received a letter from a New Yorker.

A front-page story by Patrick McGeehan in today’s New York Times Metro Section says it all in its title: “A Week of Random Backpack Searches Yields Little Drama.” The past week has resulted in several thousand searches of the bags of passengers in more than 400 subway stations. Results? According to police and transit officials, one arrest for possession of illegal fireworks, no legal challenges (yet) and “minimal resistance,” despite the fact the NYDS is not tracking how many people decline to submit to a search. The Port Authority Police Department, which oversees the PATH trains, did keep track and of the 8,010 briefcases, backpacks and purses searched (without any arrests), only five people refused and walked away without incident.

There’s a reason great scenes in New York-based movies take place in the Main Concourse of Grand Central, instead of that terminal’s Midtown brother, Penn Station—Grand Central is beautiful. Hundreds of bustling commuters there suddenly start waltzing in The Fisher King, while in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a couple in love rushes through the concourse as people in the crowd around them disappear one by one.

Meanwhile, Penn is a workhorse, serving 500,000 commuters daily as the busiest public transport station in America. It’s also confusing and ugly, inside and out. I should know; I’m in it daily to get to and from work. But the original Penn Station, built in 1910, was as grand, if not grander than Grand Central. Look at these beautiful gelatin silver contact prints taken circa 1935 by Berenice Abbott and you will agree. Click each one to view a large version in a separate pop-up window.

Foremost, you’ll notice the massive steel uprights, with lighter steel tracery, arches and vaults above. A close second are the marvelous windows and skylights. None of that is present in the current Penn Station. Not even close. If ever there was a station deserving the stereotype of an underground pit packed with dreary crowds blinking under harsh florescent lighting, it’s Penn. “One entered the city like a god,” architectural historian Vincent J. Scully wrote of the station. “One scuttles in now like a rat.” Governor Pataki recently characterized Penn as “horribly inadequate,” while others have referred to it as “a bland hub” and “a large basement.” I’d say the structure it most closely resembles is a parking garage, with all the wamth and character that implies.

So what happened? Blind civic ambition and a misguided attempt at renewal.

In 1963, the station building, which spanned two full city blocks from W. 34th to W. 32nd Streets between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, was demolished to make way for the Penn Plaza office skyscraper and Madison Square Garden.

Only now is the city moving forward to right this wrong. Just west of the Garden sits the James A. Farley Post Office, New York’s largest, and designed by the same architects, at the same time and in the same style as the original Penn Station. On Monday, after about 10 years of financial and logistical bickering, the state named the development team that will combine half of the post office and an improved version of the current station into a new Penn Station, its design mirroring the old. The new version, for instance, will feature tall, steel arches atop which will rest a huge, lightweight skylight. The front of the post office, boasting a grand staircase and a long row of 53-foot-high Corinthian columns, will serve as the new station’s main entrance.

It’s expected to be completed by 2010 at an estimated cost of $930 million, serving as the new catalyst for West Side redevelopment now that the $2.2 billion plan for the Jets Stadium has been squashed. My hope is that the station will bring back some of the area’s architectural beauty.

On my way to Academy Records, waiting for the 1 train in the Christopher Street station, I saw this sign. Crafty folks like to pass the time waiting for their trains by spelling new words with these universal signs, but this was the first time I’d seen this particular arrangement.

I also scrutinized the “public art” wall murals in the station and noticed for the first time that one depicted Marcel Duchamp in drag. It’s not every day you see cut-tile illustrations in a subway station of a French dada artist dressed like a woman. I later researched Duchamp’s connection to the West Village and discovered that not only did he have a studio there, but in 1917, he and some cronies camped out atop Washington Square Arch, setting off balloons and declaring the Village “an independent nation,” a notion that holds true to this day.

It’s monumentally tacky, but the first thing I thought of when I heard about the London public transportation attacks on Thursday was Sliding Doors. In the film, there are two concurrently running and radically different storylines: one in which Gwyneth Paltrow’s character catches her train in the London Tube and another in which her train’s doors close before she can get on.

This probably wasn’t too far from the truth for an untold number of people, and for one specifically that The New York Times reported about on July 9:

Paul Dadge overslept. That meant he reached the subway late, boarded a train at King’s Cross late, and ended up two trains behind—instead of possibly inside—the one ripped apart by a bomb deep in the tunnel outside the Edgware Road station at 9:17 a.m.

New Yorkers were reminded of the bombings whether they wanted to be or not. The day after the London attacks, the NYC public transit system was put on “high alert,” which meant a temporarily increased presence of uniformed cops wandering around the stations and subways. I found out later that the city had literally assigned one officer to every train in the city during rush hour, amounting to thousands of police officers, state troopers and National Guard members, standing around looking bored or vaguely menacing.

Having a uniform on every train is a weak semblance of security, and something that can’t and won’t practically continue, but really, as I suggested last month, there is no protection against terrorism. That’s why it’s terrorism. It seems kind of obvious to state but the AFP ran a story on the topic on Friday:

With millions of people converging daily on the subways of the world’s major cities, analysts say it’s nearly impossible to stop determined assailants carrying out attacks like those seen in London.

Militants have targeted public transport as a relatively easy way to sow terror in urban populations, which often have little choice but to use trains that are dangerously exposed to attack.

It went on to mention that the Tokyo subway system, which is the world’s largest and which has had tight security since the 1995 sarin gas attacks, is taking the additional step of removing most of the few trash cans still remaining in its stations. Authorities will also pay closer attention to passengers’ baggage but admit there is no foolproof security. Even hand-checking every rider’s baggage wouldn’t work as there other options for bomb placements including restrooms, trash cans and public areas.

9/11 was a blockbuster of an attack, but looking at the bigger picture, the events in Tokyo, Madrid and now London suggest that terror attacks in general have evolved to be quick-and-dirty, nearer the ground and hitting closer to home for many in the world’s largest cities.

“We always knew there was going to be an explosion in London,” said Dadge, the Brit who overslept. “It’s a question of when, not if. It’s pure coincidence that I was there then.”

When savvy New Yorkers are waiting for the subway, they walk to a specific spot on the platform in order to board a specific car. (If they’ve ridden the route often enough, they know exactly which platform point to walk to.) This way, when they reach their destination subway stop, they are nearest the exit to their street-level destination. Most New Yorkers perform this action whether they’re fully conscious of it or not, while others care passionately about it. Most people, for instance, do it on their way to and from work, while at times, you’ll notice that after a subway has pulled up to a stop and opened its doors, some people on the platform are booking it in order to seemingly inconveniently enter a specific door of the train, instead of simply boarding where they’re standing.

I don’t know if they’re aware of it, but the New York Times seems to have been the first to name this complex yet commonplace phenomenon. Last summer, in a tongue-in-cheek guide for Republicans visiting the city for the convention, they called it prewalking. (See “Surviving in the Land Down Under“ by Randy Kennedy, in the Sunday, August 29, 2004 issue.)

Andie and I have been using the word in our casual conversation since then and bandy it about with friends to allow it to virally catch-on with others. But a cursory Google search shows it hasn’t caught on, with most references to prewalking referring to a developmental stage in infants. Yet even though the practice remains essentially unnamed, it exists, and in places outside New York.

For example, I noticed via an item this week on Boing Boing that other subway systems have guides folks have assembled in their spare time, to show graphically, for instance, board here in order to exit the system here. The Toronto subway system, for one, has the wallet-sized TTC Subway Rider Efficiency Guide, while for two quid at a UK bookstore, you can purchase The Way Out Tube Map, which is a prewalking guide to The Tube in Central London. Having such a guide for New York’s subways would be great, although it would probably be the size of the Cleveland phonebook.

The MTA announced last week that it is discontinuing the 9 subway line effective May 31 (“at 5 a.m.,” they added ominously).

As I understand it, the only difference between the 1 and the 9, which run on the same physical tracks, is that the 9 used to make all stops between the W. 137 and W. 242 Street stations while the 1 skipped them. But as the MTA succinctly puts it, “Service will be as frequent as it was when the 9 operated.”

So nothing much practical is changing, although I know I will simply miss the name and the idea of the 9. West Siders typically refer to the 1 and the 9 collectively, i.e. “We’re just off the 1/9 at 86th Street,” so to discard the 9 is like separating Siamese twins.

Flying back in to LaGuardia last night, I took the M60 bus to the subway and noticed the city had already blacked out most of the suway-signage “9” icons, which are a red circle with a Helvetica “9” inside. They were still faintly visible, like newsprint in a Jasper Johns painting.

Although a circle in and of itself is comforting in a zen-like way, the two red circles indicating the 1/9 always seemed particularly relaxing to me. Relaxing to say, too. I’d argue it’s the same with other “clustered” lines in New York that are chiefly known collectively, like the 4/5/6 or the N/R/Q/W. The 1/9 had the added benefit of cadence and rhyme. As the Beastie Boys rapped on last year’s “An Open Letter To NYC,” “We’re doing fine on the 1 and 9 line.”

The dirtiest cars in New York City’s subway system are on the 1/9 line, according to the annual “Subway Shmutz” survey released yesterday and conducted by the Straphangers Campaign of the New York Public Interest Research Group, a student-directed consumer, environmental and government reform organization.

Hey, that’s my subway line! The survey specifies that only 14% of the cars on the 1/9 were clean, down significantly from 55% in last year’s survey.

In other words, you probably want to wash your hand after shaking mine.

After dinner at Bone Lick Park and on my way home, between the W. 14th and W. 18th St. stops on the 1/9 line, my car of the subway train was empty except for me. I don’t think I’ve ever had a subway car to myself before, even at 1 a.m., so instead of enjoying my two minutes of solitude, I took a photo.

Today was the last day of watching Jimi’s cats and lurking around his apartment. I’ll miss it, and I’m disappointed I didn’t get a chance to lie to anyone that it was “my place in the Village,” you know, where I spend my winters.

I won’t miss the crowds of bar-goers hanging around directly below Jimi’s second-story windows, arguing drunkenly, smoking and, as I heard on Saturday night, spontaneously breaking into a screamingly loud rendition of the chorus for Biz Markie’s “Just A Friend.”

What I will miss are the heaters in his apartment that are much more easily regulated than the ones in mine. I’ll miss the large amounts of space in which to vogue along with to Madonna songs, the three AirPort Expresses, the Calphalon, the friendly cats and the neighborhood’s trendy charm.

Also, I never realized how much more convenient it is to take the ACE trains from W. 4th Street to Penn Station; they’re considerably closer to both my origin and destination than the 1/9. Plus, because I was taking the ACE uptown in the morning and downtown in the evening (the opposite of my commutes on the 1/9), I went against the rush-hour crushes and the cars were sparsely populated. And the trips only took 15 minutes instead of the typical 30! [Then again, five years can be a long time to wait for the C train. Jan. 26 Update: The New York Times reported today that the Transit Authority has revised that five-year service disruption period on the C down to nine months, tops. That’s still quite a wait. ]

But if I like Jimi’s place that much, I should make an offer. He’s moving out by the end of March February for a nicer place in Chelsea Hell’s Kitchen. Good luck, Jimi! You’ve come a long way since Harlem, apartment-wise.

This list, which is a perfect companion piece to “NYC’s Official Rules of Inclement Weather Umbrella Etiquette”, is from “The Vice Guide to Everything”, which gets my vote for one of the funniest, most offensive things I’ve read this year.

• Stop sprinting down the stairs like it’s Judgment Day. There’s another one coming in 10 minutes.
• Give up your seat to very old people (“If their hair is gray, you cannot stay”), pregnant women, and the handicapped. If you do give up your seat, it is a DON’T to make eye contact with any other riders as you do it. They will think you only want them to notice how great you are. You do NOT have to get up just because somebody is a woman. They need to pay the price for liberation sometimes.
• Don’t act as if you’ve exited the bowels of Alcatraz and are witnessing sunlight for the first time in 20 years when arriving at the top of the steps when leaving the subway. There are people behind you who’d like to keep moving, so don’t yawn, turn on your phone, stretch or weave from side to side so no one can get past you. Additionally, don’t try to finish up that cell-phone conversation on the way into the subway. You know how you love to pause on the stairs to fill someone in on how you can’t afford to buy them fries, or how you’ll be there in 10 minutes? Take that shit somewhere else.
• If you are on the train and you see one of those poor motherfuckers in a dead sprint toward the closing subway doors, DO just fucking hold it for them, please. The MTA is lying: It will not delay other trains, and it’s not “safer” just to wait for the next train—the conductor isn’t going to gas it with some woman’s leg hanging out of the car. Plus it’ll give you this really cool man-over-machine triumph-type feeling.