Anthrax Conditions

Monday, 29 October 2001

The terror campaigns do seem to be messing with New York's mind, at least a bit. Subway service is being disrupted more often than normal. A couple Fridays ago (the 19th), I was on my way up to CUGC the 1 train suddenly skipped all the stops between 96th Street and 168th; I had to take a bus to get back down to Columbia at 116th.

On Monday (the 22nd) I was at the gym in the morning, listening to WNYC on my armband radio, and at around 8:45 they announced that the F train was skipping 14th Street. At 9:00, some more stations at 59th Street were shut out. Another twenty minutes and everything was back to current normal, and the cops hadn't found any wrongdoing.

Wednesday (the 24th) a scaffold collapsed on Park Avenue, just north of Union Square, killing five people. Not only Park Ave. was closed off, but also Broadway as far north as 23rd Street.

Then this past Friday (the 26th), I tried to transfer from the Q to the Seventh Avenue line at Times Square, only to find a cop on the platform shouting that none of the trains would be going north from that platform, and if we didn't know an alternate route to go home, shame on us. Another cop told me it was because of anthrax.