Dan's Papers - April 25, 2008 - The Hampton Subway Newsletter

The Hampton Subway is running! The Hampton Subway is running again! I can't believe this has happened. But it has. Last Tuesday at midnight, a whole crowd of us demonstrating against the closing of the subway in Hampton Bays ran down the stairs to get in. The cops didn't stop us. In fact, many joined.

You wouldn't believe this, but there is no door or gates down at the bottom of the stairs, so you can just walk right onto the platform. And guess what was there? Yes! A subway train at the stop, the doors open and ready to go. We jumped the turnstiles and went aboard. From looking at the debris and the newspapers left in some of the cars - we found a Dan's Papers from early March - this train was last in service on February 17, the day they sold the subway.

But I can tell you that all this crap about the Hampton Subway System being sold and being converted to an underground club for the rich is simply not true. There are no fancy renovations under way. There's no spa or private millionaire's club off the platform in Southampton, no Eliot Spitzer heading up a team of security guards, no art on the walls, no nothing. And I can tell you all this because although at first we climbed on the train just to sit in the cars for old times sake, suddenly there was someone running through the cars asking if anybody was a motorman or something. And so the found hero of this. His name is Frank McNamara and he's a retired motorman from the New York Subway System living in Hampton Bays. And so he went into the motorman's booth in the front car, turned the key in the ignition and off we went.

He went real slowly at first. He was worried that there were trains parked in other stations. But there weren't. We drove the entire route. The trains are in the Montauk yard. As near as we can figure, all the trains got parked there and then Commissioner Aspinall and his cohorts took this one train back to Hampton Bays to the main office there and that's where they were arrested. There's no other explanation for this.

We've now got nearly half the trains running and they're leaving every half hour, not quite as great as the every 15 minutes we've been used to. We need more motormen! More conductors! More subway token booth operators! If you were one of the 1,000 people who lost your job when this place got sold, come on down. We're running two shifts - 6 a.m.-1 p.m. and 1 p.m.- 8 p.m.

As for the rest of you, we're up and running and we are FREE! We've found a huge stash of subway tokens - there are billions and billions of them. And we've got some of them out by the turnstiles in driving range pails that Poxabogue Golf lent to us so you don't have the jump the turnstiles. And there are huge storage tanks filled with diesel out at Montauk and if we can get enough volunteers, we can keep this subway in service running for the next month at least. I don't know yet how this is going to turn out. But we'll figure something out. The Hampton Subway is back!

This is Hampton Police Chief Tom Brody. For the last few days, as I am sure you know, there have been crowds of people at the top of the stairways at every subway stop demanding that the subway be reopened. My officers have been working crowd control. Last night I got a call on the radio from Sergeant Fred Feeney saying the crowd there heard some noise coming from down below. And he wanted permission to investigate suspicious behavior. So I told him to go ahead. I also told him to deputize everybody there so they could help him look. So they all went down to help but they didn't find anything.

What we have to do now is report the results of our response to the suspicious noises we investigated at the Hampton Bays Station to the owners of the Hampton Subway or the Hampton Subway Club, whoever they might be. But so far we don't know whom to call. The Commissioner is on death row and the warden told me they do not allow phone calls to prisoners on death row. Maybe we'll just wait until he gets out.

We also think from citizen reports made to us, that the Hampton Subway was never sold. We think these billionaires might have taken an option to make it into their "private club" just to make the State buy the subway system from them for hundreds of billions of dollars. And so we have detectives from our fraud division sorting through the paperwork in Subway headquarters here in Hampton Bays. And we will soon see.