FROM THE FIELD: THOM NICKELS: Subways are for Sleeping

Let’s suppose you’re at Septa’s 15^th Street station running to catch the Market Street El because you’re headed to 34^th and Market for an important event. You hop aboard an idling train but as soon as the doors close behind you there’s an announcement that the train is an express to 69^th Street.

There’s no choice now but to ride to 69^th Street and take a return train to 34^th Street.

You wonder: why wasn’t the announcement of an express made when you were outside the train instead of inside?

After the long haul to Upper Darby, you discover that the 69^th Street station platform is packed with disgruntled commuters. Unusually large numbers of people are waiting for return trains to West Philadelphia and Center City. Has there been a bomb scare, a suicide attempt, a breakdown of the system? Nobody seems to know what’s going but in a sense it doesn’t matter. In a matter of seconds a train headed back to Center City opens up. You board the train with the massive crowd while casually noticing that there are several homeless people sound asleep throughout the car.

Then: A woman’s voice garbles some sort of information over a Septa loudspeaker. The garble is a result of poor diction and a lousy sound system. The unintelligible announcement is repeated but the fact is the speaker is too close to the public address system so the message sounds like a scolding mixed with heavy breathing.

Why can’t Septa provide voice diction lessons to the people it puts behind loudspeakers and intercoms?

A collective groan rises up among the passengers as the public address garbler manages to get out six clear distinctive words: this train is out of service.

A working train eventually pulls up. Once inside, you notice that several seats inside the train are occupied by sleeping homeless people although it’s only 6:30 PM. One homeless guy has his legs in a garbage bag. Another man is spread out over two seats and he has a large shopping car6t stuffed with his belongings. One empty seat has been urinated on. That familiar city subway stench is in the air. A white guy in dreadlocks goes from car to car selling bags of Swedish Fish. A small wizened toothless woman, her skeletal face evoking near death experiences, does a drug induced snake dance in the middle of the crowded train.

Adam Gopnik in a 2016 New Yorker article entitled, ‘Let Us Sleep on the Subways!’ writes that not so long ago “there were lonely cars at lonely times,” but today “the subways are packed at 4 in the morning and 5 in the afternoon.” The numbers, he says, are daunting.

Gopnik attributes much of the growth in New York’s ridership from the rapidly growing neighborhoods of Brooklyn. “To put it in plain English, in the unending tsunami of hipsters traveling to and from what were once quaintly called the outer boroughs. A generation has mastered the trains.”

Gopnik writes that most of the people sleeping on New York subways are the stoned or homeless. The same is true in Philadelphia, of course. How many valuable commuter seats do these chronic sleepers take up? My guess is ten to fifteen percent of each car, especially on a Sunday morning when you’ll spot more deep sleepers than at any other time. Some of the homeless are not asleep but sit and ride the El for hours in a semi-hypnotic state. It’s doubtful whether the sleepers have Sopite Syndrome (a nuero disorder where symptoms of fatigue follow short periods of activity). Most are using the trains as a temporary home.

The sleeping homeless exacerbate the problem of trains so overcrowded that Market-Frankford El stops like Girard have trains whizzing past and not stopping to pick up passengers because there’s no room for them.

In New York City, transit police go car to car to wake up the deep sleepers. Former NYC Police Commissioner Bill Bratton stated that “subways are not for sleeping.” His sentiments were seconded by Mayor Bill de Blasio who said, “I know people have gotten out of work and are tired, but we are going to start waking people up.”

This would include commuters who take cat naps.

Gopnik attributes this universal tiredness to “the perpetual-motion machine that services today’s errand-driven economy.”

Septa would be wise, perhaps, to add sleeping cars where the perpetual-motion homeless can join commuter cat nappers and the chronically stoned. Speaking of being stoned, there’s not a square inch of the city where you don’t smell that rancid odor of mind destroying marijuana, a smell that is quite different from the sweeter and far more pleasant smell of weed in the 1970s.

Sleeping on the subways has been an urban problem for as long as there have been subways.

The New York Times in 2018 ran the following headline: “As Homeless Take Refuge in Subway, More Officers Are Sent to Help.”

Elle Magazine in 2016 ran the following story: Why Does the Subway Make Me So Sleepy?”

Then there was Edmund G. Love’s Harper’s magazine feature, Subways Are for Sleeping, in 1956, where the author details the day-to-day life of a NYC vagrant, Henry Shelby, a university graduate who once held a high paying job in Manhattan. Fired from his position and locked out of his hotel room for non payment of rent, Love asked Shelby how he managed to look so clean and well dressed while being homeless. Shelby talked about the 65 cent baths at Grand Central Station, how he sleeps in libraries, how he took one change of clothes (he had two) to the cleaners every other day so he always looked presentable.

Shelby went into detail about the tricks to sitting in train or bus stations for long periods of time. Carry a briefcase, he said, but not a ratty-looking briefcase and police will leave you alone when they do security checks. Shelby told Love that he never sleeps on the same subway train two nights in a row so as not to arouse suspicion from train security. He also maintained that police left him alone if he pulled out a book to read. Love titles this section of the article, The Well-Kept Vagrant.

Shelby spent days in museums and galleries where he acquired great amounts of knowledge about painting, so much so that for a time he thought about becoming a painter himself.

New York, New York is a hell of a town....

“Vagrants are rarely molested in New York museums and galleries,” Love wrote. “Shelby is apt to smile and say this is because the guards can never distinguish between a legitimate bum and an artistic one. They never disturb a person like him because they never know when they are trying to eject an artist who is holding a one-man show on the third floor. “

In the 1950s there were thousands of men and women in various stages of vagrancy wandering the streets of New York. One estimate was 10,000 to I million. Many carried sandwich boards, worked as roustabouts on the waterfront or washed dishes in restaurants.

Love’s book inspired the 1961 Broadway hit, ‘Subways Are for Sleeping,’ with lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, starring Carol Lawrence.

In cities as big as New York and Philadelphia, the homeless sleep everywhere, including Starbucks.

A friend told me about his recent visit to the Starbucks by Macy’s. “Usually it's crammed with customers sipping their brew and hammering on their laptops,” he said, “This time, I found the place nearly empty around noon although a covey of homeless people huddled in a few chairs in one corner. I've heard that Starbucks has experienced this nationwide once they opened their doors after the unfounded accusation of racism here in Philadelphia broke after the two guys were removed from the Starbucks in the Rittenhouse area. “

Starbucks turns into a homeless shelter.