He Came Dancing Across The Water, Cortez — What A Killer

Neil Young has dispatched a crew of soundmen to steal our soul:

All week, a man with a microphone has walked the subway platforms to collect the clattering of the rivets and the whistling horns, the distortion in the loudspeaker, the hush in the compressor’s song and the dying of the brake like some wounded thing.

Even in that racket, some find value. The recordings are the chief selling point of a new reproduction of a subway train by the Lionel model train company made under a license from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for completion by year’s end.

Other companies have made models before, but this one pays unparalleled attention to sonic detail, recreating the subterranean soundscape in elaborate hi-fi to win the favor of collectors and self-styled train geeks, keepers of a nostalgic anachronism to rank alongside comic books and baseball cards.

Among their number count the musician Neil Young, so devoted that he conceived a control system to reproduce the sounds of the rails, then acquired a minority interest in Lionel more than a decade ago.

“Realism is the byword,” Mr. Young said by telephone. “It’s a heavy thing moving down a track, like a real thing even though it’s a miniature.”

. . .

Recording began below Brooklyn on Monday, in the tunnels of the New York Transit Museum. There [Bruce R.] Koball was joined by a few transit supervisors and Mark Wolodarsky, an off-duty conductor. Mr. Wolodarsky was standing in the cab of Car 9306, a model R33s introduced in 1963 to run the 20-minute route from Times Square to the 1964 World’s Fair in Queens.

“I’m more or less ready to rock and roll here,” Mr. Koball declared.

Mr. Wolodarsky activated the train’s generator to charge the batteries, then opened and closed the doors. The men on the platform deemed the action too fast, and Mr. Wolodarsky tried again.

“There was no puff of air,” lamented a supervisor, James Harris. Mr. Wolodarsky tried again. In this manner they recorded the compressors and the generator, the brakes and the brake release. There were two long buzzes and two short, signals between conductor and motorman, then a low whistle, a guttural rumble and a high lonesome sound.

. . .

“It’s a symphony of motion and sound,” Mr. Young said. “New York City. What’s more American than that?”

If You Don’t Work There Then Grover Norquist Will Have Won

Grover Norquist likes to talk a big game about drowning stuff in bathtubs, but really he should just make them work in the Freedom Tower:

Employees of state and federal agencies that may be among the first occupants of the Freedom Tower said yesterday that for many of them, horrible memories of Sept. 11 were still too fresh to consider a return to ground zero. Their emotional responses indicated that engineering a government-led reoccupation of the site may be more difficult than public officials recognize.

“I will not be able to work there,” said Ely Yulman, a tax auditor for the New York State Departmentportationion [sic] and Finance, which lost 40 employees in the World Trade Center. Mr. Yulman said he survived the attack only because he was out of his office in the south tower on the morning of Sept. 11.

“I have strong feelings of personal sorrow,” Mr. Yulman said. “The people who were there on Sept. 11, 100 percent they will oppose this idea.”

Alicia Ferrer, a tax auditor who lives in Chelsea, said she escaped that day because she decided to run an errand before reporting to her office on the 87th floor of the south tower. Her memories of the apocalyptic scene on the streets of Lower Manhattan — the falling bodies, abandoned vehicles and scattered shoes — are still quite vivid, she said as she arrived at a Sept. 11 memorial service for union members last evening.

“If my life depended on it, I couldn’t go there,” Ms. Ferrer said. “It would be beyond imaginable to put someone back there. If you had to go back there every day where you know their souls and spirits have to be, I don’t know. I couldn’t do it every single day.”

The Daily News’ Michael Daly has a similar idea to let the FBI and CIA earn their keep. I won’t even make a joke about the Saudi Embassy . . . is there anyone out there who would want to work in this building?

With Landlords Like This, Who Needs Enemies?

They’ll obviously have no problem at all leasing all that space:

The head of the Port Authority said he would rather quit than ask his staffers to work in the Freedom Tower — a stance that landed him in hot water yesterday with Mayor Bloomberg.

“Twice these [PA employees] were the subject of that attack, and I am not going to ask them to move into that building,” PA Chairman Anthony Coscia told The Record of Hackensack, N.J., in yesterday’s editions. “I’ll resign, but I won’t ask them to move into that building.”

Coscia, whose agency was based at the World Trade Center during the 1993 bombing and lost 84 employees on 9/11, conceded publicly in June that his staffers were skittish about returning to Ground Zero.

Although he’s since pressed on with the PA’s commitment to lease some 600,000 square feet in Tower 4, a smaller, 61-story building planned at the Trade Center site, his Freedom Tower statements to The Record were notable for their candor — which Bloomberg didn’t appreciate.

The mayor said Coscia’s stance “doesn’t help” the effort to lure tenants to the iconic 1,776-foot skyscraper.

“I don’t happen to agree with him,” Bloomberg added. “And I think it is as safe a building as you could possibly ever, ever live in, work in.”

“You Remember 1977, Right?”

New York Magazine investigates the outbreak of suspicious fires plaguing valuable development opportunities in Brooklyn:

The fact is we’re in a burning season. Uniformed Firefighters Association stats say the 2006 “fire season” — the winter months when items like electric blankets and space heaters are in operation — saw an increase in “greater” blazes (of two alarms or more) of 50 percent over the record year 2005.

The market blaze was only one of the many, many “suspicious” fires to hit the Brooklyn development zones of late. Within three months, from December 7, 2005, to February 24, 2006, there were eleven such fires along Prospect Heights’ “Pacific Street Corridor,” formerly home to single-story factories and flat-fix establishments but now part of the realty zone sandwiched between the escalating rent sprawl of Williamsburg and Fort Greene and the proposed Atlantic Yards megaproject to the West.

Location, location, location. The proximity of the afflicted Prospect Heights addresses raises eyebrows: 1033 Pacific, 1084 Pacific, 1198 Pacific, 1440 Pacific. Other fires were around the corner, at 530 and 600 St. Marks Avenue. Two more occurred at 461 and 658 Park Place, with another at nearby 683 Dean Street.

In the worst of these, the three-alarm arson fire at 1033 Pacific, a dowdy four-story apartment that had been sold and resold several times prior to the blaze (the deed shifting from 1033 Pacific Partner LLC to the 1033 Pacific Partners LLC), four people died. These included Assita Coulibaly, a 36-year-old immigrant from Burkina Faso, and two of her small children. Also dead was 24-year-old Sherrie Williams, who jumped from the fourth-story window. She landed on the concrete stairwell; another jumping tenant, Kassoum Fofana, fell on top of her, possibly saving his life. Months later, the building remained burned out, Williams’s name handwritten on the still-extant row of buzzers.

This was part of a larger pattern. According to FDNY stats, 2005 was the single busiest year in Fire Department history, with a total of 485,702 calls answered. This beat out the former record of 459,567 calls, set back in 1977.

You remember 1977, right?

Location Scout: Greenpoint Terminal Market Fire; Atlantic Yards.

[Adjusts Monocle] “I Do Say, Driver, What Is That Fanciful Poured Concrete Rising Forth From The Van Wyck?”

A tale of two airport commutes, from Sunday’s FYI column:

Though I often go to the airport, I don’t know anyone who has used the AirTrain to get from Jamaica to Kennedy Airport. Do many people ride it, and does it make any money?

Grrr . . . why don’t you just get back in your helicopter, jackass?

And here’s what you’re missing.