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Ups and Downs of Getting There
By RAY SANCHEZ
May 6, 2002
Sheila Mackensie, a slight woman, had a baby strapped on her chest, a
stroller at her feet and a screaming toddler at her side as she stood at
the top of the steep subway stairs at 53rd and Lexington.
A stranger offered a hand.
“No, thank you,” Mackensie, 37, said politely. “I need the practice.”
She even managed a smile.
Surely, one of the most astonishing feats of city life is the way
Mackensie and her three young sons maneuver through the subway system
to get anywhere in New York.
On this day, Mackensie paused and took a deep breath, then began
the long, brave descent into the Lexington Avenue station.
The baby, named Eamon, was 12 weeks old and weighed 16 pounds.
Heading down the stairs, Eamon, his round face pressed against his
mother’s chest, bounced in his sleep.
In the stroller, Daniel, 2 1/2, also was asleep, oblivious to
the thump of the rear wheels after each step.
Sean, age 4, took the handrail with two tiny hands. He appeared to
slide down to the train station like Spider-Man.
“Sean, slow down!” his mother implored. “I told you to be careful.”
Now people were rushing down the stairs, past Mackensie and her sons,
eager for a Friday night train into the weekend.
When she finally reached the turnstile, Mackensie slid her MetroCard
through the slot. She then tried to get the attention of a busy
token-booth clerk.
After a few minutes, the clerk unlocked the magnetic station gate and waved
the family through.
From the top of the long escalator to the E train platform, a mother
proclaimed, “Thank God!” The escalator was working.
Imagine a time when parents with children had to get around the subway
without elevators or escalators. No, thanks, Sheila Mackensie will tell you.
Such a time once existed. Elevators did not come into wide use in the
city until the late 1800s, while the first escalator in New York was
built in an elevated train station in 1900 when the trains were run by
private companies. The modern escalator was developed in the 1920s.
Now, the greatest transit system in the world — with hundreds of
miles of track and 468 stations and high-tech subway cars — has only
116 elevators and 176 escalators for use by valued customers such as
Mackensie and the boys.
Of course, not all of these conveyances operate on a regular basis.
New York City Transit officials last week wouldn’t discuss the work
of its Elevators & Escalators Department. They wouldn’t comment on
the propensity of the system’s first moving walkways — in Long Island City —
to break down at rush hour.
Those $3.5 million walkways, connecting Court Square and
23rd Street/Ely Avenue, are just 6 months old.
Outside the city’s subways, moving walkways have been around a long time.
London’s Heathrow Airport has had them since the late ’60s.
Japan installed the first moving walkway in a subway station in 1967.
Now, in the month of May 2002, NYC Transit tries to work out the kinks
of its first moving walkways ever, in the borough of Queens.
The masters of the subway are fully aware that their primary job is
to keep the trains moving.
Any other obligations to parents with young children, the elderly
and the disabled are incidental to that function, and they know it well.
The Department of Subways at NYC Transit is contemplating awarding
a maintenance contract for the walkways to a Finnish firm with offices
in Long Island City, the same firm that has been responsible for
repairing the walkways, which are blocks from its offices,
over the past six months.
So now Sheila Mackensie and her precious sons were stepping off the
E train at 23rd Street/Ely Avenue on the way home to Greenpoint in Brooklyn.
She held Sean with one hand, the stroller with the other.
Eamon and Daniel slept through the roar of the train as their mother
trudged toward the stairs at the end of the platform.
She climbed the short stairs, weaved around some people selling
pirated movies and CDs, and walked to the first of the two moving
walkways that would carry her across the 460-foot passageway
to the G line.
“Thank God!” a mother proclaimed under Long Island City.
Copyright © 2002, Newsday, Inc.
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