By Matt Flegenheimer, September 14, 2014
Bob Devine uses a mechanical claw to grab a book lost at 34th Street.
The
requests trickle through the bowels of the New York City subway system,
funneled to workers more accustomed to calls about tunnel fires or
ceiling leaks.
A
problem is reported at Columbus Circle one recent afternoon. A
passenger could be in great distress. Delays are minimal, but movement
on the tracks has perhaps never been slower.
So
would a crew mind collecting its helmets and hauling its mechanical
claw to rescue the turtle — fumbled by a rider — currently plotting its
very methodical getaway from Midtown train traffic?
“It’s
a big city,” a transit worker, Vinny Mangia, had said a day earlier,
reciting a mantra of his office. “Somebody’s going to drop something.”
And
somebody, if the item is sufficiently treasured, is going to try to
pick it up. These are the fishermen of the subway system, cobbling
together homemade instruments to pluck items from the tracks and release
them to a grateful city.
Workers
have returned a bag of hospital-bound blood and corralled a collection
of artificial body parts, scooped engagement rings from the rails and
reunited children with stuffed animals.
They have lifted bikes and basketballs.
One
worker, Bob Devine, recently recovered the detritus of a lover’s
quarrel: a bag of clothes hurled beside a third rail in the Bronx during
an argument.
“We’re O.K. now,” the man told Mr. Devine, repacking his jeans.
For
as long as there have been subway tracks, New Yorkers — haggard,
perpetually busy and forever jostling for space — have been dropping
things on them.
But
in recent years, the workers say, the rigors of the job have
multiplied, with smartphone proliferation and in-station Wi-Fi producing
a more distracted ridership and sending more phones tumbling to the
tracks.
“That’s job security,” said Mr. Devine, a 30-year veteran of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
Indeed,
the pickup crews, which also perform track work and respond to
emergencies when necessary, are afforded a unique window on consumer
behavior.
Workers
can trace trends in accessories — changes in the price of gold have
coincided with a decrease in calls about jewelry, they say — and gauge
the relative popularity of new authors.
They
can pinpoint the moment the iPhone surpassed the BlackBerry, and they
predict, by now with near certainty, that travelers are most likely to
drop either device on a Monday. “People are going back to work, they’re
annoyed, they’re fumbling around,” Mr. Mangia said, by way of
explanation.
Other
transit agencies appear less zealous in their approach. In Boston’s
transit system, there is no team dedicated to retrieving dropped
objects, though crews who walk the tracks overnight often pick up items
on their own. In Chicago — where workers “do not use any device” like
the mechanical claw, a spokeswoman said — operators on stopped trains
occasionally descend from their posts to retrieve wallets or phones.
Most
New York travelers appear pleased with the vigilance and, often,
enthralled by the claw: the long-limbed fusion of an extendable paint
stick, a grocery grabber and, in Mr. Devine’s case, an old token bag to
protect the gadget from the elements.
On
a recent weekday at the West Fourth Street station, Mr. Devine and his
team partner for the day, Leonard Geraghty, tracked down the wheel of a
sliding door, which Bart Platteau, from Harlem, had fumbled on the way
to a hardware store for repairs.
“Yes!” the rider shouted, as Mr. Devine lifted his tool from the tracks.
Mr. Platteau inspected the wheel for a moment. “Great service,” he said before leaving.
Next, the team traveled to 34th Street, where a book was propped against a rail.
“ ‘War and Peace,’ ” Mr. Geraghty guessed, training his flashlight below. In fact, it was a novel called “Gunz and Roses.”
In
some cases, including the turtle rescue, other transit personnel help
recover items before workers like Mr. Devine and Mr. Geraghty arrive.
(The transportation authority described the reptile as “large,”
reporting that it fell out of a brown paper bag. The woman carrying the
bag stayed behind until the turtle was lifted to safety.)
A
recent change by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, charging $1
for new MetroCards, has made the workers’ searches more manageable,
coaxing many riders to refill their cards rather than piling them on the
tracks.
But scheming travelers, spotting a pickup crew, occasionally claim cards or other items that are not theirs.
“I
have a game I play with them,” Mr. Geraghty said. “I tell them, ‘You
drop a watch or something?’ They say, ‘No, it’s a phone.’ It’s just a
test.”
Sometimes,
ownership is more obvious. Travelers balancing on one leg, for
instance, tend to be responsible for reports about lost shoes. Then
there was the No. 6 rider who lost both at East 59th Street, Mr. Devine
recalled, and $40, too.
When
the bills landed on the tracks, she tossed a flip-flop in their
direction, hoping to pin them down. She missed. But her second attempt
landed.
“I thought it was pretty smart,” Mr. Devine said.
Mr.
Geraghty cited a run-in at Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, about four
years ago, as his most memorable. He recovered a glass eye — “brown,” he
said — and returned it to its owner. The man wiped it off and pressed
it back into place. Upon hearing this tale, Mr. Devine countered with a
memory about a set of false teeth.
There
is the occasional aggrieved passenger, chafing at the response time if a
crew is traveling from another call at a far-off station. But almost
universally, riders are appreciative. A few have tried to tip the
workers, though they say they have never accepted.