Saturday Afternoon in Chelsea: Horrific Subway Accident at 23rd Street-Eighth Avenue Station

At noon today we had just finished teaching our class at Fashion Institute of Technology and were on our way to the subway entrance at Eighth Avenue and West 25th Street for the 23rd Street stop when we saw the tragic aftermath of what looked like a horrific subway accident.

Some people in the crowd said a person was hit by a train, and we saw firefighters and paramedics bring up someone on a stretcher, transfer the person to a wheeled cart, where some began the movements of CPR and hustled the person into an ambulance.

There were dozens of fire trucks and other vehicles, a couple of ambulances, and several police cars, along with many, many first responders.

They all looked grim. What a horror, whatever happened. We haven't been able to see anything anything about it on the news.

 

An old woman with a granny cart came over and said, "You're taking pictures of this? You should be ashamed of yourself!" We said nothing and walked to Sixth Avenue, where the A, C and E trains had been rerouted.
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UPDATE: Gothamist said the person died, that it may have been a suicide. Very sad.

Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

Wednesday Morning in Gramercy Park: Mayor Beame's Trees

When we got off the M101 Limited bus this morning at Third and 23rd, we were struck by the spring beauty of the trees on the southwest corner. The tree on Third Avenue near the corner Starbucks has a little plaque on the ground in front of its trunk.

It reads

On Sept. 9, 1977, Abraham D. Beame, mayor of the city of New York, planted this tree, the first of 75 trees donated for the beautification of our community by the Third Ave. Merchants Assn. (TAMA)

Mayor Beame couldn't have been too happy that day, a Friday. The previous day, Thursday, had been the Democratic primary (moved from Tuesday to avoid a conflict with Rosh Hashanah) and returns showed him coming in third, behind Ed Koch and Mario Cuomo, who'd advance to the runoff.

The city was coming off the "summer of Sam" when Son of Sam was shooting people and we'd had the disastrous 1977 blackout. We were writing our short stories, publishing them in little magazines, and about to begin the fall term teaching two sections of English at Long Island University, where we began working two and a half years before. This morning, about to teach our classes at SVA, we're grateful to the Third Avenue Merchants Association and Mayor Beame for the trees that brighten our day.