After 114 years, NYC’s subway finally gets cleaned!

And all it took was a pandemic!

source: New York Times

It started in an undisclosed location in the heart of Manhattan with a man who had been nicknamed the “Shutdown Czar.”

Sprawled across a digital screen the width of a football field, brightly lit rectangles representing subway trains rolled along a map of the New York City transit system in real time.

Dispatchers, who control the movement of trains, called out updates to crews as the system started to wind down.

And Hugo Zamora, a transit agency veteran who had been tasked with overseeing the first planned nightly shutdown since the subway opened 115 years ago, paced the floor of the Rail Control Center, calmly watching history unfold.

“You anticipate storms, you anticipate hurricanes, you don’t anticipate pandemics.” 

Hugo Zamora
Metropolitan Transportation Authority

The shutdown early Wednesday marked the first day of a new normal for New York’s subway: for the foreseeable future, as long as the coronavirus pandemic remains a threat to the city, the system will shut between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. to give cleaners more time to thoroughly disinfect trains, stations and equipment.

The closures are part of an effort to ensure the subway system is safe and to lure back leery riders, even as the transit agency reels from a deadly pandemic that has ravaged New York and crippled the public transit system.

Since March, the coronavirus outbreak has sent ridership plummeting by more than 90 percent, killed at least 109 M.T.A. workers, starved the authority of its usual revenue streams and prompted an influx of homeless people seeking refuge on mostly empty trains.

“We’re in an unprecedented moment in the history of our city……..The reason we’re taking this extraordinary, unprecedented action is to protect the safety and public health of our customers and our employees.”

Patrick J. Foye
Chairman of the M.T.A.

Still the closing leaves an indelible mark on a city long defined by its round-the-clock hustle and unending energy.

Since the 1890s, New Yorkers have ridden public transit at all hours of the day and night on street trolleys, moving underground in 1904 to the city’s first subway line connecting Lower Manhattan and Harlem.

At that time, the 24-hour service carried crowds of workers from manufacturing plants and port docks who, even in the wee hours, proved lucrative to the private companies that once ran the system.

In the decades that followed, the constant movement of people also shaped how the growing metropolis matured. The steady pulse of the city’s underground arteries fueled New York’s economic growth and its clichéd reputation as an insomniac city.

But in the wake of a catastrophic pandemic, even this mainstay of New York life has not been spared.

Inside New York’s Historic Subway Shutdown

Calamity Jane