![]() Where the N and W lines end at Ditmars Boulevard in Astoria, Queens, there is a doorway near the turnstiles marked “Station Plaza.” It is often guarded by a man in black pants and a black dress shirt held together with a bobby pin he has blackened fingernails, which he waves in front of his face while humming continuously.īeyond the doorway, a labyrinth of dim halls lined with businesses: electrolysist, lawyer, chiropractor, Internet cafe, cigar store. She is, they say, driven mad by the guitar’s unamplified tinkle. Their nemesis is the old lady across the street. ![]() His friend Jordan Carfagno, 23, Newport tucked behind ear, fiddles with a lighter. Sciacca, 25, a deliveryman for the city’s health department, picks out chords on an acoustic guitar. Another sign notes that the State Division of Cemeteries has pronounced All Faiths “exceptionally well-operated and maintained.” A robin perches proudly atop it.Ī few quiet blocks away, the bad boys of Middle Village assemble on Bartholomew Sciacca’s stoop. ![]() “We still trust God at All Faiths,” a sign there says. In Middle Village, Queens, at the end of the former Lutheran Cemetery line, now known as the M, stands the Lutheran All Faiths Cemetery. In the pre-subway era there were a Calvary Cemetery line, a Holy Cross Cemetery line and a Green-Wood Cemetery line. Woodlawn was hardly the first cemetery to recognize the benefits of mass transit. Woodlawn became the cemetery of the Harlem Renaissance, permanent home to Duke Ellington and W. Olsen says at an old wood table beneath the gaze of cemetery presidents in musty gilt-framed portraits. A sales office opened at the south end of the cemetery to greet the subway traffic. Woodlawn was linked to the rest of the city on what is now the No. “From the earliest point in 1910,” says Susan Olsen, the cemetery’s historian, “our board of trustees are recording in their minutes about their activities with the folks who are building the subway: ‘We want that last stop here we want people to be able to go.’ ” But the cemetery fathers smelled action when they heard that the Jerome Avenue subway line might be extended. What better place to begin the tour than at the end of life itself?Īt the turn of the 20th century, Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx was doing fine, really, as a resting place of the wealthy and powerful. Nor will the last stops on lines like the C and the G, whose endpoints occur along other lines. From the marshy lowlands of Tottenville to the lush hills of Riverdale to the ceaseless clangor of Flushing, the end of the line manages to take in the entire breadth of the city beyond Midtown Manhattan.įor this survey, every last stop was visited, though not all those visits will be included here. There are subway lines that end, logically, where the city runs out of land lines that end, anticlimactically, where builders ran out of money even a few that fetch up in bustling downtowns of one sort or another. Yet to visit all the system’s extremities is to see that the last stop is not a single, monolithic place. There is, surprisingly often, a cemetery. There might be a Last Stop Deli, a forlorn bar, a maintenance yard populated mostly by rows of empty trains. Middle Village what is that, a jousting park? As it turns out, the end of the line, like most ends, is a place of abiding mystery.Īt the city’s often-threadbare fringes, there is an inescapable sense of lonesomeness. ![]() For those who get off somewhere else almost everyone the end is just a sign on the train. There are 24 stops on the New York City subway system past which you can ride no farther. The dead lie in rows uncounted, and the living mourn and wait and work and love and strum guitars on the front stoop, annoying the neighbors. An ancient sign in a boarded-up window opposite the platform reads “Wrestling Weight.” A stuffed bear mans a betting window in a struggling OTB parlor. Train cleaners wielding worn-sided corn brooms and generic spray bottles marked “lemon” or “Windex” amble onto the cars, rousting any sleepers and drunks unmoved by the conductor’s voice grating through speakers:īeyond the station gates, a priest dreams of a vineyard. A few stragglers, or a lurch of homebound commuters, head for the street. At the end of the line, the subway creaks to a stop a few yards short of the yellow crash bumper.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |