1
UNDERTHESTREETS
BALLISTIC
I
n August, a mysterious and selective
chaos descended upon the No. 7 sub-
way line. Late-night trains were arriv-
ing at their last stop, in distant Queens,
with broken windows. Most 7 trains
consist of eleven cars. In one particular
train, all the windows had been broken
in two cars, for a total of forty-three
windows. This is not a common prob-
lem. Sometimes rowdy baseball fans will
break a window or two, but nobody could
remember breakage on such a scale. In
a few weeks of repeated incidents, the
count of broken windows mounted to
three hundred and five.
When vandalism occurs in a car, the
entire train is taken out of service. In
the case of the 7, trains needing atten-
(“I always get asked about the name—
I’m no relation”) have the title of car in-
spector, and both began working at the
barn of the 7 train fourteen years ago.
Morales is big and has a broad face;
Gambino is slighter, with a narrow face.
Both wear T-shirts, light zip-up fleeces,
and dark trousers, and both radiate un-
flappability. When the trains with bro-
ken windows started showing up, Gam-
bino and Morales fixed them. “A window
can take two, three hours to replace,”
Gambino said. “The window frames are
aluminum, the setscrews that hold them
in place are steel, and sometimes the
screws have reacted chemically with the
frames, and you need to drill them out.
That takes time.”
“The guy who did the vandalism
must have used a hammer,” Morales
said. “It’s impossible to bust those win-
dows with just your fist. They’re bal-
listic safety glass, they don’t shatter. Ac-
tually, they’re two panes thick, with a
sheet of plastic laminate in between.
Lifting them out or putting them in,
we needed other workers to help, be-
cause they’re heavy.”
“Some days it was funny, the guy
would only break two or three windows,”
Gambino said. “I guess it depended on
his mood.”
The names of some of the different
go down, you sign your name, you vote,
you put it in the box. What do these
people think?” She added that her hus-
band, her daughter-in-law, and her
daughter-in-law’s mother had all been
poll workers. “There are, like, seven states
that take ballots up to three days after.
This is not new. So why are you com-
plaining now?”
She had no patience for the Trump
people, but the Biden people, she felt,
were misguided: “You know what, if they
want to protest for different, other things,
rights and all that, I’m all for it. But ev-
erybody voted already!”
She went on, “I used to like living
here. But the last few years there’s too
much crime, everyone has a gun, every
single day.” She asked a correspondent
if he was from here; he said no.
“Then what are you doing here?” she
asked. “I just feel like, you know, I have
sons, too. It makes you worry, too, be-
cause every single day, this one’s shot,
that one’s shot. They’re shooting each
other. Why don’t you fix that, when
you’re marching? How ’bout this: Hire
a security guard for every block. How
about that? There’s a lot of things you
can do. I don’t understand it. I would
do it different.”
—Dave Eggers
tion descend a ramp from the elevated
tracks at the Queens end of the line,
cross a train yard, and enter a mainte-
nance facility known as “the barn.” This
building is like a huge performance space,
about seven hundred and fifty feet long,
about forty feet high at the peak of its
skylights, and wide enough to fit five
subway trains, parked on parallel tracks.
Usually, when you enter a subway car,
you’re at the height of its doors. In the
barn, you see it from wheel level up,
which makes it look taller and more
awesome. Workers use portable fibre-
glass stairsteps to enter the cars.
Balwant Ramoutar, the superinten-
dent of the facility, grew up in Guyana,
has a West Indian accent, and wears a
white hard hat bearing a black “7” in-
side a purple circle. “The broken win-
dows were a very big job,” he said re-
cently, to a temporarily hard-hatted
visitor. “At one time, eight consists”—
segments five or six cars long—“among
the forty-six No. 7 trains were out of
service. Usually during morning rush
hour we send a train every ninety sec-
onds. This is a busy line. In one month,
the No. 7 trains usually run a total of
about 1.9 million miles.” With trains out
of service because of broken windows,
the total mileage was considerably lower.
José Morales and Frank Gambino
“Big deal, you were in labor for nineteen hours.
I’m sure it was no picnic for me, either.”
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THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER23, 2020 17
