Dan's Papers - May 22, 2009

At the request of Commissioner Bill Aspinall, of the Hampton Subway, who is away on a business trip in the Bahamas, I attended a dinner on Shelter Island last Saturday night put together by the Shelter Island Bridge and Tunnel Authority as a benefit for the Shelter Island Fire Department.

"You'll have to tell the president of that Bridge and Tunnel Authority about the link up we made between our Shelter Island stop and their tunnel between Shelter Island Heights and Greenport," Aspinall said. "They don't know about it."

I didn't know about it either. As the founder of Dan's Papers, which publishes the Hampton Subway Newsletter every week, all I did know was that the Hampton Subway had begun digging a tunnel from Sag Harbor to Foxwoods, which had not worked out. The tunnel had been dug almost to Connecticut - the construction was under the Long Island Sound - when the workmen struck oil. The oil poured in, resulting in the Hampton Subway sealing off the tunnel at Sag Harbor to keep the oil from flooding the entire system. I asked him to tell me about this "link."

"Well," Aspinall said, "Shelter Island voted not to have a Hampton Subway stop. But then we were digging our subway tunnel under the car tunnel that runs between Shelter Island and Greenport and we thought well, why not just link the two up? They wouldn't have to know. But if a later generation of Shelter Islanders wanted a subway stop, we could easily accommodate them."

"There is oil in their tunnel?" I asked.

"Of course not. We were just one wall from making the connection when the oil blew into the construction. So when we built the cinderblock wall to seal off Sag Harbor, we built another wall where we were about to break through to the Tunnel."

"The Tunnel sits on the sea bed. The subway to Foxwoods is 60 feet below the seabed. How did you link them?"

"We built lots of escalators."

The tunnel is one of the two prides and joys of the Shelter Island Bridge and Tunnel Society (SIBTA), the other being the Sunrise Bridge to Sag Harbor. It was going to be difficult to broach this with the president for life of SIBTA, Arthur Bloom.

"Where is it?" I asked.

"It's on the seabed eight tenths of a mile north of the tunnel entrance at Shelter Island Heights."

Although the Hampton Subway and the Stirling Memorial Tunnel do not exist, except in the imaginations of Bloom and this writer, (Bloom and friends had thought up SIBTA at the Dory Restaurant on Shelter Island in 2006; I had thought up Hampton Subway after writing about SIBTA), it nevertheless seemed a preposterous thing to have to tell him, that there was a subway entrance halfway through the two-lane car tunnel between Shelter Island and Greenport. How would people get to it? Walk? Have people take them in by car and drop them off? There is no place to pull over in there.

The dinner on Shelter Island at the Chequit Inn was real, and I was greeted happily by Bloom in the lobby of the place. Half the island had turned out to raise money for the fire department. And as he was master of ceremonies for the occasion, he was in full tuxedo, which was a bit embarrassing, because I was not. Nor, I saw, when I peered into the dining room, was anybody else.

In the lobby, next to the souvenir table - SIBTA hats, t-shirts, car stickers, etc. (I had brought the book One Year on the Hampton Subway) - Bloom told me a wonderful story involving the Chequit Inn and the Bridge and Tunnel Authority.

Apparently, at around midnight last summer, a man called the inn wishing to make a reservation. On duty at the time was a young night clerk and so it was he who answered the phone. He took down the name, the date, the credit card number and so forth, at which time the caller asked if he could tell him directions to the bridge to get there. He was coming through Sag Harbor.

"Bridge? I don't think there is a bridge," the young man said.

"Well, it's right on your website. There's the ferry and the bridge."

"The only way I know is the ferry," the young man said. "I don't know about any bridge."

"Look, what is this? You have some 'in' with the bridge people? The ferry is round trip $12.50. The bridge is $2.50."

"I'm new," the young man said. "This is my first year here."

"If you can't tell me how to get to the bridge, then in the morning, I'm going to tell the owners of your hotel about how you are trying to steer business to the ferry."

In the morning, true to his word, the prospective visitor phoned Linda Ecklund and told her what the night clerk had told him.

"Well, I'm sorry sir," Mrs. Ecklund said. She, like everybody else, knows about the supposed bridge. "And yes, we do have a bridge. But you can't use it anyway. It's for residents only."

Bloom, resplendent in tuxedo, handed us a program to the event and ushered me and my wife into the hotel dining room where a band, Mambo Loco, was playing, people were dancing and some folks were already lining up with plates to begin to get food. As there was an open bar and the event was well underway by the time we got there, everybody was in a pretty happy mood. I hadn't yet told Bloom about the hook up to the Stribling tunnel.

The Chequit did lay out an excellent spread. There was salad, chicken wrapped in ham, wild rice and vegetables and asparagus. At a certain point, Bloom stood up and banged a knife onto a glass and began the short program he'd scheduled for the evening.

He talked a bit about the new Bridge Street Trolley and Rail Delivery Service, (BSARDS), a subsidiary of the Shelter Island Bridge and Tunnel Authority, which should be open on the island before the Fourth of July. He then introduced Dr. Sue Hine, who spoke about her work as chief rodent mitigator and chef de cuisine for the Authority. Then His Most Serene Excellency Roy Pellicano presented the Toll Collector of the Year award, a framed award announcing this person as Toll Collector of the year, to Peter Reich - who moonlights as a town councilman - after which the poet laureate of SIBTA Thomas Hashagen, read his poem for the occasion. There was then the door prize raffle (tickets sold during dinner) overseen by the Rev. John Kiffer, a committee report on crime read by Lt. Benjamin Heins, the Commandant of the Firing Squad, in which the assemblage learned that suicides off the bridge were down from the same month one year ago, murders were up slightly and the inappropriate touching of farm animals rate was holding steady.

Bloom then introduced me, the emissary from the Hampton Subway, and told the crowd that when I had written an article about SIBTA in Dan's Papers early last year, there had been a big spike in the number of hits on the sibta.com website.

"Shows the power of Dan's Papers," he said. "Those of you here who do advertising, you should be in that paper."

By the way, I thought the event program was very interesting because of the many stores and other organizations that allowed that their names could be associated with SIBTA. They included Dory Towers, the Chapel in the Grove Biological Weapons Research Laboratory, the DAC (Citizens Against Dyslexia), the Hay Beach Canal Zone Authority and the Mashomack Preserve International Airport.

There was also a reminder from SIBTA and the Department of Homeland Security: If you SEE something suspicious, SAY something suspicious.

All in all it was a pretty wonderful evening. When it was over, I had my picture taken with Bloom and the Shelter Island Town Supervisor Jim Dougherty, who was on hand, after which, on the way out, I told Bloom about the subway stop underwater between Shelter Island and Greenport.

He was dumbfounded. "How could they DO this?" he asked.

"Don't worry," I said. "There's a wall been built so no oil can get in. Someday, or maybe never, the stop can be opened."

Then we drove home to East Hampton, taking the Sunrise Bridge, which I must say, is in fine repair.

Sunday morning I called Aspinall in the Bahamas and told him about the evening.

"The Shelter Island Bridge and Tunnel Authority has a motto," I said.

"Nulla Tenaci Invia Est Via."

"What does that mean?"

"For the tenacious, no road is impassable."

"Hmm. I have to think about this. Right now, though, I have to go. Beach volleyball. We made the finals."

A reading of a chapter from the book One Year on the Hampton Subway by Dan Rattiner, the first of several this summer will take place May 30, Saturday morning at 11 a.m. at the OMNI transportation hub of the Hampton Jitney in Southampton.