At midnight, the police began shooing riders out of the sprawling system. An hour later, transit workers locked turnstiles and pulled yellow chains across station entrances. By 2:12 a.m., every passenger train was out of service.
As the subway system ground to a halt early Wednesday morning, it marked a watershed moment in New York City’s history: the first planned overnight shutdown of the subway since the system opened 115 years ago.
With the city still in the grips of the coronavirus pandemic, the subway will remain closed from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. for the foreseeable future to allow more time to disinfect trains, stations and equipment.
The nightly shutdown is the pandemic’s latest blow to New York’s public transit, which is reeling as workers die and fall sick, ridership plummets and revenue evaporates.
But for the city to recover, the system needs to be restored, which means trying to make the subway as safe as possible to lure back leery riders.
On Wednesday morning, these were some of the scenes that unfolded as the country’s largest subway system — and one of the few in the world that run round the clock — came to a standstill.
An hour before the system’s official last call, about 1,000 police officers and over 100 outreach workers from the Department of Social Services fanned out across the system to begin clearing stations. The police closed gates or tied yellow caution tape across entrances to keep people away. Outreach workers stationed at 30 of the system’s 472 stations offered homeless riders assistance in finding a shelter.
By midnight at the 207th Street station in Inwood, Manhattan, around a dozen police officers posted up along the mostly empty platforms. After a train arrived at 12:01 a.m., an outreach worker approached three passengers and told them the station was closed.
One of the riders protested, asking why they were being kicked off the train an hour before the shutdown was scheduled to start. “I thought it was starting at 1 a.m.,” he grumbled.
As trains continued to pull into the station, dozens of passengers, most of them homeless, were coaxed out of the subway and onto the street. One woman, Diane, limped down a flight of stairs, holding the railing and calling out for help.
“I got messed up,” she said, explaining that she could not remember the name of the shelter where she had been staying. “I don’t know where the shelter is. I don’t know where to be.”
About six miles north, in the Bronx, two police officers and a nurse were gently trying to persuade an older man named Harry to get off a No. 2 train at the Wakefield-241st station. “Harry, c’mon, let’s try to sit up,” one police officer told the man, who was lying on his side in sagging track pants.
After several minutes he sat up, put on a sneaker that had slipped off his foot and stepped off the train with two officers holding his arms. He made it about halfway down the platform, before pulling away from the officers with a stern “No!” and slumping onto a wooden bench.
“Leave me alone,” he said. He finally descended onto the street when an emergency services worker arrived with a wheelchair.
A second man on the platform had come off the train in his own wheelchair, carrying a suitcase. An M.T.A. employee, Cynthia Davis, asked him, “Sir, can you walk at all?”
“I cannot walk,” he replied. Transit officials eventually arranged for him to reboard the train and ride it to the nearest wheelchair-accessible station, 233rd Street.
At 1 a.m., as trains wrapped up their final runs, the man charged with orchestrating the the expansive system’s shutdown paced across the carpeted floor at the M.T.A.’s Rail Control Center in Manhattan.
“You anticipate storms, you anticipate hurricanes, you don’t anticipate pandemics,” said Hugo Zamora, a 30-year veteran of the M.T.A. who has been nicknamed the “Shutdown Czar” by his colleagues.
Inside the control room, a large screen showed small yellow, green, red and purple rectangles representing trains in real time as they ambled along a map of the system’s tracks. Static from the transit system’s radio network gurgled through loudspeakers.
Mr. Zamora and his team had spent the last week creating a plan for the shutdown. They wrestled with issues such as where to store out-of-service trains (train yards are not large enough for the M.T.A.’s entire fleet) and how to schedule trains so passengers making transfers would not be stranded in the system when it shut.
Plus, even as the system closes to customers, the agency must operate around 135 trains throughout the night to carry transit workers and police officers.
But the sheer size of the system complicated their scheduling the most, Mr. Zamora said. Though transit officials have called the shutdown a four-hour affair for riders, on longer lines trains had to stop providing service at some stations 40 minutes before the 1 a.m. lockdown and did not complete their last run until a little after 2 a.m., he explained.
Early Wednesday morning, as he repeatedly glanced at the large screen and fielded calls about logistical hiccups (“There’s a terminal somewhere where passengers are refusing to leave, that’s all,” he said around 1:40 a.m.), he was optimistic about how the plan was panning out.
“Not bad, not bad,” Mr. Zamora murmured as the last passenger train was removed from the system at 2:12 a.m.
As the last trains in the system reached their final destination and passengers emptied out, teams of cleaners in Tyvek suits, shoe covers and face masks poured onto the subway cars.
They mopped the floor with a sudsy Lemon-Quat cleanser that smelled sweet and saccharine, and wiped down every bench and pole with white cloths soaked in a bleach solution.
They also swept each car and scrubbed off graffiti. These days, the cars have become especially filthy, with people leaving behind food scraps, trash, vomit, urine and feces, two cleaners in Coney Island said.
After the trains’ initial cleansing, they were whisked to a rail yard where the transit agency is testing new disinfecting technology, like ultraviolet lights, microbial agents and electrostatic sprayers.
“This is the single largest cleaning and disinfecting program we’ve ever undertaken by a mile,” Sarah Feinberg, the interim president of New York City Transit, said at a news conference on Wednesday.
The transit agency has deployed 500 additional cleaners in order to disinfect every train car, every night.
At the Casey Stengel bus depot in Flushing, Queens, M.T.A. workers misted down the expanded fleet of nighttime buses with disinfectant late Wednesday night. From a distance, workers could hear the rumble from the last of the nearby No. 7 trains echoing in the cool night.
With every train out of commission and stations shut down, many of the roughly 11,000 riders who have relied on late-night subway service in recent weeks turned to the city’s sprawling bus network.
To accommodate the influx of riders, the transit agency has added 1,168 bus trips — a 76 percent increase from the usual nightly bus schedules — and put an additional 344 buses on the road, officials said.
Around 3 a.m. in the Bronx, the Bx15 buses that pass by St. Barnabas Hospital were mostly empty. Several only carried a rider or two. One bus had four riders. The bus behind it had none.
Rolando Almanzar, 56, sat slouched over a chair on a bus that he had boarded near St. Barnabas around 3:15 a.m. He was headed to Hunts Point, where he works as a truck driver delivering groceries and has never been busier.
“I got to do what I got to do, I’m a truck driver,” he said. “I’m risking my life.”
James Collins, 39, who rode another bus, said police officers had evicted him from a No. 6 train at 125th Street in Manhattan around 12:30 a.m. Rather than go to a shelter or stay on the street, he opted for the Bx15.
“I’m usually underground,” Mr. Collins said. “It’s a hassle going through this night.”
5 a.m.
The system comes back to life.
Just before 5 a.m. in Long Island City, Queens, a slow trickle of riders was already making its way to the Court Square station.
Colin Johnson and Heron Hancock, both construction workers, arrived just before 5 a.m. from their homes in Jamaica, Queens. When they showed up, they found a yellow chain still draped across a stairway entrance.
For Mr. Hancock, 50, encountering a problem on his commute felt like business as usual.
“It’s always something with the subway,” he said. “The delays, the waits, the suspended service.”
Minutes after the first No. 7 train pulled into the station at 5:03 a.m., a transit worker removed the chain. For most of the early morning the train platform remained empty and quiet, except for the chirping of house sparrows.
Alex Juca, 22, was on the platform and knew he was going to be late opening up a Wendy’s restaurant in Manhattan. Normally he has to be there by 5:30 a.m. But with the subway closure, he would not arrive before 6 a.m. and would lose a half-hour’s pay.
“If the subways are not running I can’t get there,” he said. “It’s what it is.”
Victor Blue, Jonah Markowitz, Azi Paybarah, Sean Piccoli and Nate Schweber contributed reporting.
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