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Scenes from a strike

BY ROBERT POLNER AND LUIS PEREZ | STAFF WRITER

December 21, 2005

It might have been tough to find any winners in the transit strike yesterday unless you counted Alfred Carallo, a furniture maker whose one-bedroom apartment in Queens faces -- and virtually kisses -- the elevated No. 7 line, stilled by the transit strike.

"I don't believe how quiet it is today," said Carallo, 34, of Long Island City, noting that the rumble of passing trains typically shakes his living room windows and rattles the cups on his kitchen table. "The silence today, it pretty much woke me up," he added with a laugh.

He had the day off and planned to cook chicken and rice for his wife, who left home early to walk across the Queensboro Bridge to her office in Manhattan. "They had better get these trains rolling again, or we won't be able to sleep," he said.

One of many difficult moments on a day that called for the resourcefulness for which New Yorkers are known, and the patience for which they are not, was the morning's horrific line to buy tickets outside the Long Island Rail Road station in Woodside.

There, a column of commuters stretched the length of four city blocks, in a rectangle starting and ending at the station entrance. At one point it looped around and extended for yet another block along Roosevelt Avenue.

The scene was not unique, either: An equally daunting line, at the Forest Hills LIRR station, stretched for nearly a half mile.

Tour buses that occasionally pulled up, proffering rides on traffic-clogged streets leading to the Queensboro Bridge, only seemed to add to the frustration and confusion.

"This is cruel, this is punishment," said Jeanette Caballero, 29, of Woodside, a medical assistant who works on Park Avenue, echoing the sentiments of many of those waiting in line with her in Woodside.

She stomped her feet to keep warm, though her teeth chattered anyway. And she was still only halfway through the line at that point.

"I could get sick," said Caballero, who railed against the striking workers and their union leader, and cursed the cold as well. "It's dangerous, especially for older people."

Anyone trying to steer a delivery truck into midtown Manhattan before the city's moratorium on deliveries was lifted at 11 a.m. could just forget it.

Truckers José Rameres, 48, and Umberto Marcenaro, 46, both of the Bronx, pulled into gas stations and waited two hours for a green light from police.

"Why don't they negotiate?" asked Rameres at Gaseteria in Long Island City, referring to the Transport Workers Union.

"What are you going to do?" Marcenaro said with a shrug. "You hurry up, and then you wait."

Drivers heading into midtown had to have at least three passengers aboard, a rule that meant many exasperated motorists, cabbies and livery drivers slowed down to offer free rides to pedestrians to meet the quota.

That has to be a first for business-comes-first New York.

"No, thanks," Gabriela Sandoval-Torres, who was walking to her job at a Manhattan investment bank from her home in Corona, said at first, instinctively, when a livery car driver offered her a ride. Then, almost as quickly, she asked: "How much?"

The driver, a woman, made a zero sign with her hand. Sandoval-Torres climbed in, grateful after walking miles from her home in the cold. The livery car quickly started its engine and turned a corner, joining traffic crawling along an access road to the Queensboro Bridge at less than 5 mph.

Of all the days to have to go from 71st Street in Jackson Heights to Eighth Street in Manhattan for a routine medical checkup, Arlene Johnson, a beret-sporting woman in her 50s, chose this one.

Her friend and neighbor Regina Murphy accompanied her for the trek across the East River to downtown Manhattan. They waded happily into a stream of shoes and sneakers, backpacks and briefcases, and Rollerblades, bicycles and foot scooters.