July 5, 2009
Penn Station? For weekend crowd, it's Party Central
Late night revelers catch their train. (Dennis W. Ho / September 16, 2008)
This is the Penn Station many 9-to-5-commuters never see, or maybe they just don't remember seeing it.
It is all business during the weekdays, but on the weekends the bridge-and-tunnel crowd comes dressed to party and leaves partied out.
The MTA police have their hands full: Besides the normal duties of responding to life-and-death emergencies and guarding against terrorist threats, they also are busy breaking up fights and helping passed-out pukers.
"They either get ill, sick, vomit or they pass out and other people are scoping them out, and they become victims," Lt. Scott Floughton says on a recent Friday night, while in command at District 4 in Penn Station.
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It's still early here for the night crowd -- just after 9 p.m. on a shift that would go until 7 a.m. -- and the first emergency of the night is not related to alcohol.
A live wire falls on a train, which may or may not be charged with 12,000 volts of electricity -- a potential death hazard for anyone unlucky enough to touch the steel hull.
Track 13 is rendered out of service but the flow from Long Island keeps coming on the others. Upstairs, a crew of 23-year-old guys, Ramon Suriel, Danny Ortiz, Jimmy Pinto and Melvin Grullo, are just getting off the 10:15 from Lynbrook.
They'll probably be on a train going back at 3 or 4. "I might be drunk, but I'll be here," Suriel says. "We're going out. Meeting up with 14 girls and there's only four of us. It's a done deal," Pinto says.
They are off into the night as another group of revelers -- mostly young ladies -- comes off the 10:32 from Mineola. They don't want to give their names, but one is glad to share the recipe for the cocktail she is sipping from a plastic Starbucks cup on the sly: Smirnoff Blue (100 proof), a little 7 Up and cranberry juice.
These must be the "beauties" that a Long Island Rail Road engineer speaks of a little later at Tracks Bar & Grill, where he is convening with two other co-workers at the end of a shift. They would only talk if their names weren't used.
"It's beauty coming in and the beast coming home," the train engineer says of the transformation partying commuters make when they come in fresh and leave haggard.
The engineer and his conductor buddies know too well the iniquities of the weekend ride, a shift usually reserved for rookies.
"At the 12 o'clock hour, there are a lot of fights. At the one o'clock hour, it's the 'vomit comet,' " one of the conductor says.
"And by 2 or 3, they're zombies; the leftovers that couldn't make the 'vomit comet.' "
Fabio Bari and Phillip Prado, both 23, are familiar with the weekend routine. It's barely 1 a.m. and they are making sure to hit the 1:19 a.m. to Manhasset, which if they miss leaves them only with the 3:19. Not an option. "It's full of drunken animals," Bari says.
There are worse possibilities, however, than missing the 1:19: "God forbid you miss the 3:19. You'll be contemplating all the wrong directions you took throughout the night and your life," Bari says.
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