Tales from the Underground

Muse, Jan 2004 by Kennedy, Randy

You might have read somewhere that the New York City subway is one of the biggest in the world. But how big is it, exactly? Well, if you were to lay all of its rails-842 miles worth-end to end, they would stretch from New York City all the way to Chicago. Imagine taking a trip-underground-from New York to Chicago. Imagine how indescribably boring it would be. What would you look at? How would you pass the time? The subway is not quite that boring, of course. But the people who ride it every day from home to work, and from work to home again, often have very little to do while onboard. And so they have lots of time to notice the things around them-the funny things, the weird things, and sometimes the unbelievable things that go on in the subterranean world they visit every day.

That's where I come in: I cover the subway. I write a weekly newspaper column about life aboard the trains. This means that many of the people who ride them call or write me with accounts of the things they've seen. I grab a notebook and go underground to investigate their reports. Sometimes I find what I'm looking for. Sometimes I don't find anything and just ride around, a little bored. But many times I find a story even better than the one I was looking for.

Pigeons Ride for Free

Not too long ago turnstile jumping (vaulting the turnstile to avoid paying the fare) was almost an Olympic sport in New York. A crackdown has made it much less popular. This does not mean, however, that there are no freeloaders today. Among the most brazen are the pigeons.

I first heard this tale while talking to a veteran motorman who drove the A train and who swore that he'd seen pigeons-the plump, insolent New York City variety-walk into trains, ride for one or two stops, and then walk out again, as if they were too smart to fly. He said this fact was common knowledge among many subway workers, but I thought he was kidding me.

So one day, I took the train as far south as it would go, to a place near the ocean in Queens called Far Rockaway, one of the stations where pigeons were said to board the subway.

When I asked workers at the stations about the story, a couple looked at me as if I were crazy. But then I found a subway-car cleaner named Andrew Rizzo. He smiled. He knew what I was talking about. And he explained the mystery.

When subway trains pull into the terminal, their doors remain open for several minutes so cleaners can walk through the cars and sweep out the crumbs, pizza crusts, and other detritus left behind by sloppy riders. The pigeons wander into the cars looking for these delectable items, too. But, being pigeons, they don't understand that the doors will soon close. And so a few of them inevitably get trapped on the trains as they pull out of the station. But, once again, being pigeons, they don't much like riding trains, and so when the doors open again at the next station or the one after that, they make a break for it.

"I feel bad for the little guys," Rizzo told me. But he also admitted that he makes a habit of running the pigeons out of the trains when he sees them. "I don't want them to make no mistakes, if you know what I mean," he said.

Despite his efforts, his friends the pigeons make quite a few mistakes, all over the floor of the train.

Singing Subway Trains

Generally, the only music that subways produce is the kind so discordant you want to cover your ears: the screeching of the steel wheels, the whining of the brakes, the annoying ding-dong sound that means the doors are closing.

But several months ago, a friend of mine swore that he heard his subway train singing an actual song-or at least the first three notes from one. Specifically, he said, he was almost sure that the notes were from "Somewhere," a song in the famous musical West Side Story.

The first lines of the song are:

There's a place for us,

Somewhere a place for us.

Peace and quiet and open air

Wait for us

Somewhere.

If my friend, Roy, hadn't been a clinical psychologist, I might have questioned his sanity. He was questioning it a bit himself, wondering if he was imagining things the way psychotic people do. "Am I getting the secret message?" he asked himself.

But then I heard from other people who also had heard the notes being played by a generation of brand-new trains that had just begun to run in the subway. As the trains pulled out of the stations, they made an ethereal sound, sort of like the sound made by rubbing your finger on the rim of a crystal glass. First there was a low note, followed by a very high note and then a slightly lower note.

One day, finally, I heard these notes myself, and I agreed. They were definitely the first three notes from "Somewhere":

There's a place . . .

Figuring out why subway trains were playing the beginning of a Leonard Bernstein tune wasn't easy. My friend Roy liked to think that maybe a mischievous and inventive train builder somewhere had programmed in the musical notes as a joke. But, alas, in the end the explanation turned out to be less funny and a lot more technical. Officials from the Canadian company that built the trains, Bombardier, put an end to the mystery once and for all.