Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll get a look inside “secret rooms” that keep the subways going, or bring them to a halt. We’ll also find out what “the curse of the Mambino” is all about.
On the way to work one morning, on the platform of the station where I catch the subway, I ran into two colleagues, Stefanos Chen and Winnie Hu. With them was an official of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. They said they had just visited a “secret room” in the station. Your OMNY card won’t get you in: The entrance is by a narrow, ladderlike staircase that pops out of the grating on the sidewalk. I asked Stefanos to talk about why that secret room and others like it across the subway system are important. What are these secret rooms? They’re also relics. How old are they? They are electrical substations, 225 of them, that control the electrical power on long stretches of track. Some of these rooms are underground, like the one near your station on the Upper West Side. Some are aboveground. They look like bomb shelters — big, blocky concrete rooms filled with massive electrical equipment. Some of them have been around since the early days of the subway. The oldest one that we saw was from the 1930s. Even the newer ones have lost their sheen. The newest one, until very recently, was completed a decade ago. If something goes wrong in one of them, it can play havoc with everything and everyone in the subway system, can’t it? Yes. Unlike a lot of subway systems in other cities, the system in New York City is so interconnected that if something gets gummed up in one place, passengers could suffer the consequences on the other side of the city. Just think about the N train, which goes from Astoria, Queens, all the way to Coney Island. The M.T.A. can work around many problems, but not a loss of power. Say that someone is causing a scene on a train. The M.T.A. can usually reroute other trains to bypass the station where that train has stopped. But if the power goes out on a significant stretch of track, they’re all frozen. So no one’s going anywhere.
What goes on in the substations? What I didn’t understand until we went out and visited several of them is the magic that happens. The substations are there to get the right amount of juice onto the third rail. The third rail not only supplies the current for the trains to move, it powers other functions. As soon as the electricity cuts out, the air-conditioning is dead. The lights could flicker, and the P.A. system may only work for a certain amount of time. But the main things are the power and the air-conditioning. Losing them is the perfect cocktail you don’t want. You’re stuck in the dark in the middle of nowhere, and it’s sweltering hot. Without getting too technical, what’s the magic? This was the fight between Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla more than a century ago. AC power — alternating current — is the form of electricity most useful for long-distance, high-voltage transmission lines. Con Edison transports electricity to the subway from faraway power plants as alternating current. But to operate the trains, it must be converted to DC, direct current, with lower voltage. That conversion happens in the substations, which is why they are the most vital, underappreciated parts of the system. If they go down, nothing else matters: The trains won’t move. The M.T.A. is looking to upgrade 75 of the substations. How hard is the job? It’s pretty involved. The price tag speaks to that: $4 billion over five years in the M.T.A.’s capital budget, the majority of it spent on the subways. First they’ve got to move the aged, multiton equipment out. It takes skilled labor and know-how — and the new equipment isn’t cheap, either. What did you see when you went into the substation adjacent to my station? Your frustrations as a rider are probably justified. It felt like a cave. I was looking for stalactites. Once you get down the stairs, 36 steps down, walking backward, the room opens up. You could convert it into a nice apartment. It has a grand tall ceiling, which is necessary because you have all this electrical equipment hanging overhead. But there are leaks in the ceiling. It’s mildewy. It’s a little muggy. There was a tarp hanging in one corner where you could see water being funneled out. Water is a big problem. Some of the worst substation problems have been caused by water issues. Such as? The M.T.A. confirmed to us that water mixing with sensitive equipment was likely the culprit behind one of the worst commutes in years, a power failure that stranded more than 3,500 subway passengers for more than two hours one evening in December 2024. Firefighters evacuated the passengers from the disabled trains. But the cascading delays affected four lines in Brooklyn and continued into the next morning, snarling things for thousands more people. Obviously water and electricity don’t mix. WEATHER Expect a slightly warmer day with temperatures reaching 57 and a chance of showers in the morning. Cloudy conditions will carry into the evening with a low of around 48. ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING In effect until May 14 (Solemnity of the Ascension). QUOTE OF THE DAY “I said to him, ‘So, Mr. Heuermann, I understand that you are confessing to me on these murders. Can you please tell me how many of these women did you kill?’ He said eight.” — Asa Ellerup, on the moment when Rex Heuermann, then her husband, admitted to her that he was the Long Island serial killer. The latest New York news
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Consider the timing: On April 9, Zohran Mamdani posed for a picture with Mr. and Mrs. Met, the mascots of a certain team that excels at finding new ways to break fans’ hearts. Mr. and Mrs. Met hugged the mayor, who beamed — as a Mets fan would. After that, the Mets lost 12 straight games. Was there a connection? My colleague Emma Goldberg writes that some fans, particularly those who were already antagonistic to Mamdani, see signs of something worse: “The Curse of the Mambino,” as The New York Post called it on Monday. On Tuesday — before the Mets lost yet again, to the Minnesota Twins, 5-3 — the mayor found himself addressing whether he could do anything to reverse the curse. “I’m still keeping the faith,” he told a news conference, “as I know many Mets fans are across the city.” The conservative radio host Sid Rosenberg is not one of them. He had switched his allegiance to the Yankees and said that Mr. Met had ignored him last season but had hugged the mayor. “The hug is what started this curse,” he said. “It’s not an opinion, it’s a fact.” For what it’s worth, City Hall officials pointed out that the Mets’ losing streak started the day before the hug. But there’s also this to consider: On Monday, large cardboard cutouts of New York Knicks players were placed in the City Hall rotunda, reflecting Mamdani’s devotion to that team and its hopes for the N.B.A. playoffs. Hours later, the Knicks lost Game 2 in their series against the Atlanta Hawks. METROPOLITAN DIARY Sugar, sugar
Dear Diary: Many mornings, I would stop at a coffee cart on the corner of East 149th Street and Courtlandt Avenue in the Bronx on the way to my job teaching English as a second language. Seeing me at the back of the line, the vendor would begin preparing my usual order: a small coffee with half-and-half, no sugar. Then he would beckon me to the front, dip a teaspoon into the sugar and dangle it over my cup with a grin. Playing along, I would wave my hands. “No sugar, no sugar,” I would say. He would drop the spoon, put the cover on the cup, we’d both laugh and I would head to work. — Mary Anne McTiernan Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. Tara Terranova and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. |
