Catch all the trains you missed. That's the motto of the Transit
Museum. They took an old subway station in downtown Brooklyn that used
to be the terminal of a one-stop shuttle. In that station, they keep
restored examples of subway cars from the past. Visitors can walk from
car to car, sitting in the original seats, reading the original ads.
As I rest on seat cushions of woven cane and look around by the light of
bare bulbs, I can almost see the ghosts of people who rode these cars as
part of their daily lives.
Where are they now, the smiling children who stood looking out the front
window of car number 100 when the Eighth Avenue subway opened in 1932?
Where are all those men, their heads covered by a sea of hats, who
rode the Third Avenue Elevated down from the Bronx to an above-ground
station on Pearl Street, and went to their jobs at banks and insurance
companies?
Where can I find a person alive who once looked out the window of this
car on the Sixth Avenue Elevated and saw Radio City Music Hall from
twenty feet above street level?
I wonder if these seats still have microscopic traces of salt from the
bodies of bathers returning from Coney Island on a sweltering day in
July 1953. How many sore wrists were caused by people trying to open the
windows using the miserable latches on both sides that required not only
leverage and coordination, but the skills of an engineer?
I can almost hear the curses of the people standing under inoperable
fans.
Where are the survivors, if any are left, of the Malbone Street wreck in
1918 when an inexperienced motorman took his train at high speed into a
sharp curve at the Botanical Gardens, and the wooden cars left the
tracks and were shredded like cole slaw by the steel pillars? Malbone
Street is now Empire Boulevard, and if you close your eyes you can
almost see Ebbets Field and hear the rumble of trolley cars taking fans
to see the Dodgers play the Yankees.
These old cars are retired. They get to rest here in the museum, only
taken out once a year or so for a run around the system. They are
luckier than most of their contemporaries. The wooden ones were burned
-- burned -- in the open air in the days before pollution was even part
of the vocabulary. The steel ones were dismembered by welders. The
memories those cars held were
released by fire and now wander aimlessly through the universe.
These veterans will rest in their nursing home, playing host to their
memories, which remain locked in the cane seats and the tile floors. And
the ghosts still grasp the porcelain handstraps and lean against the
doors.
Larry Rogak, 47, is an attorney
practicing on Long Island where he lives with his wife, children and
three dogs. He was born and raised in Brooklyn in a family which
did not own a car until he was a teenager. As a result he developed a
lifelong fascination with the subway system.
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of the closing doors...