On Becoming a Transit Freak

After consulting my many calendars (standard, business, Coptic, liturgical) it is abundantly clear that we are through Q1 and the “beginning” of the year has thoroughly come to a close. I figured it was high time to make some forward progress on one of my New Year’s Resolutions - learning as much as I can about the NYC transit system. Back in January, I was discussing this with a group of coworkers and one of them was kind enough to give me one of the guest passes to the Transit Museum her family has from their membership. On a recent rainy Saturday, I decided to pay a visit.

The museum is situated underground in the decommissioned Court Street Station in Downtown Brooklyn, which has been used as a film set for several classics in the canon of “New York In the 70s, Everything is Dirty, All the Men Look Like a Stale Baked Potato” films, The Taking of Pelham 123, and The French Connection. On the day I went, the joint was hopping; clearly I was not the only one who had thought of this great indoor activity on a day with crummy weather.

I started with the exhibit that takes you through the history of the subway’s conception and construction, which featured some excellent info-graphics on rising population levels at the turn of the 20th century and the soil composition of the isle of Manhattan. “Quiet,” I screamed at the children, “can’t you little whelps see I’m trying to learn about the porosity of Fordham Gneiss?” There was a lot in this exhibit that I understood intellectually, but in a way couldn’t really conceive. Like I could grasp how they dug into the earth and built these tunnels and train tracks but also how in the hell did they manage to do this? The answer I guess was throwing cheap labor at the problem and, uh, not great safety standards?

There was a lot of dangerous work being done constructing the tunnels under the river and in uptown Manhattan where they decided to construct a series of mines for the trains rather than have them run up the steep incline that the land itself formed. I had never even considered the possibility of the trains running uphill overland or at least just below the surface, which is kind of embarrassing considering that I used to live uptown and at certain stations had to take subterranean elevators down to the tracks like I was descending into the Batcave. “Boy, I sure am deep underground! Would really suck if the elevators gave out, because I don’t think there are stairs for the use of the public!” I would think, without ever really considering why this might be the case.

There was a group of guys who blasted through all this rock and worked in the most dangerous underground conditions called the Sandhogs, and they absolutely ruled. They need to greenlight a miniseries about the Sandhogs yesterday. It will be made by Apple TV Plus, look like a million bucks, and will be watched by me and a few dogs whose owners left the streamer on autoplay while they are out of the house so they feel like someone is at home. The Sandhogs handled a bunch of dynamite and big honking drills and hydraulic presses and were in constant peril. Perhaps you’ve heard of the decompression illness or “The Bends” that scuba divers will get if they surface too quickly; well this illness was first discovered in the Sandhogs who built the Brooklyn Bridge. Damn!¹ During subway construction, the ‘hogs wore special pins that gave directions to a specific hospital in case their blood got decompressed or whatever and they collapsed. If that wasn’t enough, sometimes the compression would blow out in the tunnel and create a world of trouble. Take for example the time the pressure blew out in the Joralemon Street tunnel and four workers were sucked through 5 feet of muck and 15 feet of water before being spat out onto the surface. Here’s the words of Sandhog Marshall Mabey describing his experience getting caught in a blowout in the Montague Street tunnel:

Tighter than any girl held you, huh? Let’s not be crass. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no prude, but I don’t discuss how tight a girl holds me in mixed company, let alone to the press or a historian. That kind of talk is saved for the boys in the cigar lounge at the track, and certain members of the clergy.

Ok, I’m nearing a thousand words and I haven’t even gotten into my ranking of different kinds of turnstiles, so this report is going to be divided into parts. Stay tuned.

¹  Imagine having such an insane job that they discover an illness because of your day to day work. I mean sure, I “discovered” The Bends in college, but that was a different story.