That’s Great . . . If Only The MTA Signed My Timecard

Underground this, underground that . . . sometimes you wish they never got rid of the Sixth Avenue El:

Powerful thunderstorms swept through the New York metropolitan area this morning, tearing up trees and damaging cars and creating mayhem during the morning commute.

Subway stations were flooded, forcing commuters out onto the streets and into taxis and buses, bringing traffic in many areas to a standstill. The region’s three major airports — La Guardia, Kennedy and Newark — all reported flight cancellations and delays.

No subway line was unaffected by the heavy rains and winds, according to the M.T.A. For the time being, the M.T.A. was advising commuters to stay at home.

. . .

In Brooklyn, the F train was delayed, and as trains started up again later in the morning, subway cars were heavily overcrowded.

John Han, 50, a financial adviser, said he arrived at the Fort Hamilton stop at around 7:45 a.m., but about an hour later had given up and was going home.

“The cars are running, but real slow,” he said, accompanied by his wife. “It looked like a sardine can. We are going home and taking a shower and going to try again, because we are very sweaty.”

Around Brooklyn, motorists drove in search of an open subway line, so that they could park and take the train.

In Manhattan, the Nos. 1, 2 and 3 lines on the West Side, and the Nos. 4, 5 and 6 lines on the East Side had ceased operations as of 8 a.m.

The 42nd Street shuttle was also suspended. The E and L lines were not in service, as were significant portions of the F and J lines.

Furthermore: Commuters Try To Board A Manhattan-Bound 7 Train YouTube Video, Commuters Try To Board A Manhattan-Bound N Train YouTube Video.

Miracle Of Life . . . Free Rides For Life . . . Free Rides!

Don’t even think about getting creative with that C-section because it won’t work:

There’s no such thing as a free ride – even if you’re born on a bus or subway.

That’s the word from New York City Transit.

But Lydia Irvin is still convinced the old urban legend is true, and she hopes her granddaughter’s birth certificate is as good as a lifetime free MetroCard.

The baby girl, also named Lydia Irvin, was born on a B15 bus last Monday evening after doctors at Kings County Hospital sent her mom, Madeline Rivera, home, insisting that she was not going into labor.

Rivera and Irvin left the hospital and hopped on the B12 bus, then transferred to the B15 at Eastern Parkway.

A few minutes later, Rivera leaned over to Irvin and whispered, “I think the baby is coming now.”

Irvin suggested they get off the bus immediately, but Rivera said, “We’re almost home.”

But the baby wasn’t going to wait, and the bus driver pulled over in front of a Laundromat on Vermont Avenue. He and Irvin laid Rivera on the floor at the foot of the driver’s seat.

. . .

“She’s an MTA baby,” Irvin said. “On her birth certificate, it doesn’t say she was born at the hospital, it says on the B15 bus.

“The bus driver and several MTA employees all told me that she would get free rides for life.”

MTA officials said if that ever was the policy, baby Lydia missed the bus by some 60 years.

“I don’t know if we’ve ever done that,” a spokeswoman said. “Maybe in the 1940s, but that’s before my time.”

Nevertheless, Lydia’s grandma was optimistic.

“Too many people have told me they give at least a year’s worth of free rides,” she said. “But if they don’t, that’s OK, too — this was a miracle, and that’s all that matters.”

Drink Your School, Stay In Drugs, And Don’t Do Milk!

I don’t quite understand what Ibsen has to do with those fanciful mosaics in the subway stations, but they’re pretty kick-ass, I’ll give you that:

If you’re looking for ways to wax poetic about the New York City subway and the vast planning that went into building it, Ibsen and Shakespeare may not be the first authors who leap to mind, especially as August settles its annual swelter on the tourist-packed platforms. Kafka maybe? Beckett? Dante? De Sade?

But in 1916, in unlikely literary territory — The Public Service Record, a dry periodical about municipal works — a man named Squire J. Vickers, the subway’s chief architect, enlisted Ibsen to defend the new simplicity he was introducing into the designs of the Victorian-era system. “In his ability to omit, he is a past master,” Vickers wrote admiringly of that playwright. Then, in quick succession in the brief article, he made reference to Michelangelo, Millet, the Pharisees, Falstaff, Othello and Horatio and quoted from “Richard II” (“this royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle”).

It was, in short, another era, when the city’s builders still saw themselves as Renaissance men and moral torchbearers. But even in the context of his time Vickers was a dynamo, a grandiloquent eccentric whose other life as a painter often bled over into the subway; his taste in colors and geometric design can be still be seen throughout the system.

For both aesthetic and budgetary reasons Vickers pushed the subway onto a much more pared-down, modern path than that of his Beaux-Arts predecessors. And maybe partly because of this his reputation has always seemed to be stuck somewhere in the tunnel behind them.

But an exhibition that opened this week at the New York Transit Museum’s gallery in Grand Central Terminal may help to remedy that neglect and place Vickers more firmly among the forces that shaped the look of the city — or at least enormous swaths beneath it — in the 20th century.

. . .

Organized by Carissa Amash, a Transit Museum curator, the new show, “Squire Vickers and the Subway’s Modern Age,” tells the story of the man who, in almost 30 years as the system’s lead designer, was responsible for building more of today’s subway than any other architect: over 300 stations, many more than any other architect.

Your Arguments Have Been Deemed Structurally Deficient By The U.S. Department Of Transportation

When tragedy hits, use it:

In the wake of the fatal collapse of the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis, news reports about the poor condition of the Brooklyn Bridge have brought fears of that tragedy close to home.

The iconic bridge was one of only three run by the New York City Department of Transportation to be given a poor rating in the city’s latest annual bridge report card, according to a report by the New York Times. Despite this rating, the bridge was still deemed safe by city officials. Another crucial piece of Brooklyn’s infrastructure, the Gowanus Expressway, was not included in the report, but is in serious disrepair.

To those carefully observing the state of the Gowanus Expressway, which runs along Third Avenue in Bay Ridge, it is increasingly clear that the 45-year-old structure was not intended to sustain today’s heavy traffic load.

“[The structure] is totally inadequate to handle the weight and volume of traffic that it’s getting now,” said Buddy Scotto, who co-founded the Gowanus Expressway Community Coalition. Scotto added that every time an 18-wheeler hits the airbrakes, it takes off half the concrete.

And then there’s the one-hand-clapping sort of riddle about cars and trucks that enter Staten Island but never leave it:

In late 1980s, a federal highway bill was passed that included a provision that eliminated the Verrazano Bridge’s inbound toll while doubling the price of the outbound toll.

JoAnne Simon, former chair of the Gowanus Community Stakeholders Group and current state committeewoman from the 52nd Assembly District is concerned about the volume of trucks that ride the Gowanus after a free pass on the Verrazano. “One-way toll on the Verrazano encourages extra traffic,” she said, emphasizing that trucks ride it “to save about $40 a day.”

A two-way toll would “reduce concentration on the Gowanus,” Ben Meskin, who found the Gowanus Coalition with Scotto, said. “There will always be bad traffic, but you have to spread it out,” he added.

Is there a special non-tolled route through Staten Island that the rest of us don’t know about?

When You Put It That Way . . .

The Daily News wants you to know that we are all going to die:

The Brooklyn Bridge is one of 166 city bridges labeled “structurally deficient,” putting it in the same category as the one that collapsed into the Mississippi River.

In fact, under the the feds’ rating system, the Brooklyn Bridge scored dramatically lower than the doomed Minneapolis bridge — and the Willis Ave. Bridge, which connects East Harlem to the Bronx, was not much better.

The Brooklyn Bridge also got lousy marks from the state, which called it one of three city bridges in “poor” condition with rusting steel joints and deteriorating brick and mortar on its ramps.

The biggest problem was the roadway deck on the Manhattan and Brooklyn approaches.

The state felt the “poor” rating was enough to raise concerns but not enough to shut down traffic like it did with the nearby Williamsburg Bridge in 1988.

At the city’s iconic landmark, a reporter observed considerable rust on metal structures and areas of missing brick work on the Manhattan anchorage.

Responding to the Daily News’ findings, Charles Carrier, a spokesman for the city Department of Transportation, said, “The bottom line is, if a bridge is unsafe, we close it. Obviously the Brooklyn Bridge was not deemed to be unsafe, but there are issues we’re going to be addressing.”

. . .

City officials stood by what they termed a “state of the art” inspection system and declined to perform additional checks on any of its bridges.

In New York, the federal government has labeled 2,110 bridges “structurally deficient,” of which 166 are in New York City, records show. The feds define this as structures with “deteriorated conditions of significant bridge elements.”

All of these bridges are rated by the U.S. Department of Transportation on the same 1-to-100 scale that gave the Minneapolis bridge a “sufficiency rating” of 50.

Considering factors such as structural adequacy and safety, serviceability and functional obsolescence, the Brooklyn Bridge was given the lowest possible “sufficiency rating,” a zero.

On the other hand, Sewell Chan is not into fear mongering*:

More than 2,000 bridges in New York State meet the federal government’s definition of “structurally deficient,” from the heavily traveled on-ramps of the Brooklyn Bridge to a 28-foot span across Trout Brook near the Canadian border.

The bridge that collapsed Wednesday in Minneapolis had also been labeled structurally deficient. But the term can have a variety of implications, and does not necessarily mean that any of the bridges are in real danger of significant failure. Typically the finding means inspectors have identified some kind of deterioration, cracks or movement.

The ramps to the Brooklyn Bridge, which carries about 132,000 vehicles a day, were downgraded last year from fair to poor condition. Yesterday, city officials said $149 million in repairs to the span were under way and that the bridge was safe. Still, city inspectors were at the bridge yesterday afternoon to check on its condition.

. . .

In the last eight years, the city has spent $3 billion improving some of the 787 bridges it controls, said Lori A. Ardito, the first deputy transportation commissioner. As a result, Ms. Ardito said, the number of bridges that the city deems to be in poor condition dropped to 3 last year from 40 in 1997.

In addition to the Brooklyn Bridge, the two others were a pedestrian bridge at East 78th Street over the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive in Manhattan and a bridge at Willow Lake at 76th Road in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens.

Ms. Ardito said “poor” did not mean a structure was at risk of collapse. At the Brooklyn Bridge, the major problem is the roadway deck on the ramps, and not structures that support the roadway. She said a more complete rehabilitation was expected to start in 2010.

“The poor rating for the Brooklyn Bridge means that there’s only components of the bridge that are in poor condition,” she said. “They’re actually the ramps leading to the bridge, not the span of the bridge.”

*Not that he didn’t try . . .

Earlier: Nothing A Little Paint Won’t Fix.

Location Scout: Brooklyn Bridge.