A Nonstop Ride of the Subway System

At high noon on a recent Sunday, I stood shivering on the shore at Rockaway Beach. It wasn't so much the cold as the fact that I hadn't slept in 32 hours and had been riding the subway almost nonstop for the past 28. With about a quarter of the system left to travel, my mission to go to every subway stop was far from over.

I looked back to land and New York City stretching out north and west. I didn't see streets and buildings; I saw miles of tunnels and els. I didn't want to go back into that system and sit on those hard plastic seats. I wanted to lie on the beach and sleep. I wanted to go home?in a car. On a bike. A pogo stick. Anything but a subway.

Why were we doing this? What was the point?

My friend Matt and I were asked those questions many times in the weeks before our trip. Our friends, though, were enthusiastic.

"What a great idea," they said. "Take the most frustrating, boring and uncomfortable part of your day, and do it for a whole weekend!" But that's not the attitude you need to undertake something as harebrained as this. You must avoid asking whether, in light of infinite options?breathing fresh air, sitting on something soft, bathing, sleeping?this is how you would like to spend your time. The question you have to ask yourself is: Will you be glad when it's over?

The answer is Yes.

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I swear I was sober when I got the idea to go to every subway stop in one weekend. I was riding the 1 train down from the Upper West Side and sitting across the aisle from my wife, who happened to be sitting right beneath The Map. I love The Map. I love to read the names of all the places it goes and wonder what it's like there. But from across a subway car, The Map is just a tangled sprawl of colorful lines, the stop names tiny black marks. So many lines. So many places. The city just keeps going and going.

When I was a child I would lie awake at night terrified of eternity. Heaven seemed nice enough in my imagination?hanging out on a cloud with God and all the other dead people. But when I tried to imagine being there forever and ever and ever, I got a feeling in my stomach like I was falling from a height.

Staring at The Map on the 1 train, I saw the veins and arteries of a city so huge and complex you could never know it all, and I got that feeling in my stomach again. But it dawned on me that the New York City subway system is not quite like heaven. It doesn't go on forever. I could go to all those places. Why, it might not even take that long, providing I didn't actually get out of the train at each stop. I could maybe do it in a weekend.

The trip officially began at Union Square at 8:12 a.m. Saturday. The track on the Lexington Ave. stop at this station curves so much that moving sections were constructed to span the 18-inch gap between platform and train. I read that this curve, built to placate certain property owners, killed a man once. Conductors stick their heads out the window to make sure no one is stuck in the door anywhere on the train. But the curve puts parts of the platform out of sight. The unfortunate man was stuck partway in a door and slammed into the wall at the end of the station.

We got aboard fine and rode to Grand Central, where we transferred to the Times Square shuttle. Already I needed a bathroom. Twenty years ago, there were more than 900 toilets in the system. Then the Transit Authority closed more than 800 of them. We got off the 1 train at 110th to find a bathroom. The idea of riding to every stop without ever leaving the system has panache, but we decided early on that it wasn't worth it. We bought unlimited-ride MetroCards and forewent the style points.

After the city bought the Interborough Rapid Transit and Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit systems and unified them with its own Independent subway in 1940, people could and did ride the entire system for a single nickel. In the late 1960s and early 70s, racing through the system became a minor craze. On express trains it could be done in about 24 hours. Only the hardcore fanatics went to every stop.

At 9:15 a.m. we were back on the 1 train. At 122nd St. we emerged from the tunnel to cross a viaduct 168.5 feet above Manhattan Valley. Then it was back down again, way down, at least in relation to the hill?the highest point in Manhattan, 265.05 feet?rising above us. You ride elevators to get out of the subway here.

This was the first official line, the original IRT. (Earlier, a wealthy inventor covertly built a two-stop subway prototype beneath lower Broadway in 1870. It worked like a huge pneumatic tube: a giant fan blew the car from one stop to the next, then sucked it back. It worked, but venture capitalists were too skeptical to finance expansion.) When the IRT opened 97 years ago, people lined up around the block to ride the brand new subway. Just for the fun of it. Like us.

At Van Cortlandt Park, the last stop, we crossed the platform and took seats on a waiting train, careful to avoid a seat pooled with water. The car slowly filled as we rolled downtown. A well-dressed young couple got on at 110th and the woman turned to sit beside a middle-aged man. This man reached his stubby hand up and put it right on her bottom. Uh-oh, I thought. Here comes trouble. But no, he was stopping her from sitting in the pooled-up water.

Everyone has a part to play in the subway. The essential actors are the readers. They serve the crucial function of being engrossed in something. This allows the other riders to stare at them without much fear of being caught at voyeurism. Without the readers, you have an uncomfortable group of people pretending they don't want to stare at one another.

The readers also give those nearby something to read. At one point six of us craned our necks to read a woman's Spanish magazine article rating the macho factor, as measured by a thermometer, of several handsome men. Leonardo DiCaprio? Not very macho.

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At 96th we transferred to the 3 and rode to where it ends in a sweeping question-mark curve along the Harlem River. Then it was back down to 125th to switch to the uptown 2. There are six terminals in the Bronx, forcing us to retrace our route through 63 stops. It would have been quicker to go over land from the end of one line to the end of the next. But we decided that wasn't how we wanted to do it. We had two rules: Go to every stop. Get there on the subway.

As a consequence of the second rule, it took us five hours to ride the 2, 4, 5 and 6 through the Bronx.

We spent a lot of time at the end of the lines. That's usually where motormen and conductors start and end their days. Other Transit Authority workers are there all day, sweeping out the trash left during the train's ride through three boroughs. Most termini are above ground, as is 40 percent of the "subway" system.

At 3:40 p.m. we finally got a long run down the length of Manhattan on the 6. We switched to the 4, and then under the East River we went.

Excavating under the rivers brought special risks for the sandhogs who dug the river tunnels early this century. Just as bubbles rise to the surface of liquid, that giant column of air under the riverbed was begging for a chance to get out. When it did, it created powerful vortices. In the event of a blowout, the sandhog's job was to pick up a bag of sand and stuff it into the breach.

While the IRT was excavating the tunnel for our 4 train in 1905, a sandhog named Dick Creedon ran to a blowout with his bag of sand. Instead of plugging the hole, however, he was sucked up through 30 feet of riverbed and to the surface of the river, where a tugboat found him swimming. Two sandhogs from Brooklyn Rapid Transit weren't so lucky when they tried to plug a breach in their tunnel in 1916. Three were pulled through 12 feet of sand. One came to the surface atop a geyser that witnesses said was 40 feet high. The other two didn't survive.

At Crown Heights/Utica Ave. we switched to the 1 and rode it to New Lots. Three teenage roughnecks got on our train for the ride back. They shoved and yelled at each other so violently that everyone but Matt and I moved to the end of the car. The dispute seemed to be about some spilled candy. Indeed, several orange Runts rolled up and down the floor of the car at every stop.

Then one of the teenagers very politely asked Matt where he had bought the stars-and-stripes Chuck Taylor hightops he was wearing. We got to talking a bit. One of the roughnecks dumped banana Runts under his seat.

"Don't you like them?" Matt asked.

The roughneck smiled sheepishly. "They're too sweet for me," he confessed.

They said goodbye when they got off at Nostrand Ave. At the next stop, we switched to the 2 and rode to Flatbush Ave., then turned around again. We got back to Times Square at 8:18 p.m. Twelve hours down.

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Our route was drawn up by a group of enthusiastic transit planners who are designing the resurrected 2nd Ave. line. Voters approved a $500 million bond for this project in 1951, then in the 1970s the federal government was prepared to pay 15 percent of the cost. Both times, work was scrapped as money was diverted first to other improvements, then to transit operations because Mayor Beame did not want to preside over a fare increase.

I wish the money were spent to keep bathrooms open. At 3 a.m. I absolutely had to go, so we exited at 36th St. and 4th Ave. in Brooklyn. McDonald's wouldn't let us in. Burger King was closed. The gas station attendant was unsympathetic. My need was not the kind that could be satisfied in a dark alcove. Things appeared hopeless.

But down the street we saw a single light among the gated storefronts. It was a hole-in-the-wall Cuban joint. Only four people were inside and it wasn't entirely clear the place was open for business. A man and woman were busy controlling an exuberant drunk. They seemed happy for the distraction we brought as we ordered beers. The drunk cornered me, but I couldn't understand his slurred words. Finally one of the other men interceded and distracted the drunk long enough for me to get to the bathroom.

Behind the bar was the reason the place seemed in such disarray: the immense proprietress was passed out on the floor.

At 8:30 a.m., 24 hours into the trip, we greeted the crisp new day atop a hill at Inwood Park. The next 12 hours were a blur. Marathoners tell me the miles between about 16 and 22 are the worst. The thrill is gone, but there is no turning back.

Track work on the Jamaica Bay trestle forced us to reach some stops by shuttle buses. A few others?Broad St., Lexington Ave. and 5th Ave.?were closed for the weekend and we had to walk to them. This broke our second rule, but there was no other way to do it. We did not want to say we went to almost every stop.

In the home stretch, we became giddy. Feeling expansive, we showed our bemused fellow riders the map on which we had crossed out every stop we'd been to. The MTA says there are 468 stops on the system. This double-counts several of the stations where you can make a connection?once for each line that stops there. If you count stops like these as one?which I am inclined to do?there are 437.

Back in Union Square at 9:37 p.m., we boarded a Brooklyn-bound L for our last run of the trip. We got in the first car and stood by the front window so we could watch every inch of track roll away beneath us. We reached Canarsie at 10:11 p.m., 38 hours after we began.

There are some 240 miles in the system. With all the backtracking we did, I figure we could have reached Portland, ME, if we had traveled in a straight line. But we never went more than 16 miles from Central Park.

As we rode the A train home?O, the glory of the express!?I began to wonder: How long would it take to ride every bus in the city?