At the Stillwell Avenue station in Coney Island, Brooklyn, over a dozen police officers waited on the platform early Wednesday for trains on the F line to arrive. As one train pulled in at 12:43 a.m., transit agency outreach workers and social workers walked onto the cars, cajoling homeless riders to leave their temporary shelter.
Overhead an announcement echoed through the vast station: “Last stop on arriving train. No passengers, please.”
It was a moment that New York City’s subway had never before experienced: the first planned overnight shutdown since the system opened 115 years ago.
But with the city still in the grip of the coronavirus pandemic, the subway will remain closed from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. for the foreseeable future to provide more time to thoroughly disinfect trains, stations and equipment.
Since March, the virus has sent ridership plummeting by more than 90 percent, killed at least 109 transit workers, starved the authority of its usual revenue streams and prompted an influx of homeless people seeking refuge on mostly empty trains.
“We’re in an unprecedented moment in the history of our city,” Patrick J. Foye, the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said at a news conference late Tuesday night. “The reason we’re taking this extraordinary, unprecedented action is to protect the safety and public health of our customers and our employees.”
Still, the closing leaves an indelible mark on a city long defined by its round-the-clock hustle and unending energy.
At that time, the 24-hour service carried crowds of workers from manufacturing plants and port docks who, even in the wee hours, proved lucrative to the private companies that once ran the system.
In the decades that followed, the constant movement of people shaped the growing metropolis. The steady pulse of the city’s underground arteries fueled New York’s economic expansion and enabled the lifestyle that sparked its clichéd reputation as an insomniac city.
But in the wake of a catastrophic virus, even this mainstay of New York life has not been spared. Early Wednesday, as transit workers locked turnstiles and police officers taped off station entrances, the outbreak’s lasting blow to the city was immortalized for the millions of New Yorkers who have trudged onto a late-night train.
Across the system, the complicated task of shutting the system played out in nearly every station: Often confused early-morning riders endeavored to find other ways of getting to work. Police officers and social workers attempted to coax sometimes agitated homeless people off the subway. And crews of cleaners clamored to thoroughly disinfect the rolling stock and stations before the system reopened.
Just before 1 a.m. at the Wakefield-241st Street station in the Bronx, outreach workers from the city’s Department of Homeless Services tried to persuade homeless people in the station to leave for a shelter.
“You can’t do this to me,” the man cried. “I want to get back on the train.”
“Please get me back on the train,” he said, his voice breaking. A police officer directed him instead to the Bx42 bus stop on the street below.
Around the same time, a homeless rider at the Stillwell Avenue station in Coney Island took up the offer from outreach workers to be steered to a shelter.
The rider, Stephen Bell, 33, said he had lost his job as an environmental researcher a week ago and soon afterward his home in Queens. Three weeks ago, he also tested positive for Covid-19.
With just a blanket tucked under his arm, Mr. Bell followed social workers out of the station.
“They were really polite about it,” he said of the outreach workers, adding, “Staying out all night on the subway is much worse” than the coronavirus.
As social workers cleared stragglers from platforms and cleaners flooded into cars, the man charged with orchestrating the shutdown, Hugo Zamora, stared intently at a live map of each train from his perch at the agency’s Rail Control Center in Manhattan.
Mr. Zamora, a transit veteran who has been nicknamed the Shutdown Czar by some colleagues, explained that the sheer scope of the system makes bringing it offline a complicated process.
For instance, on the system’s longest lines, the final trains of the night were departing from the first station around 12:19 a.m. and would not reach the end of the line until 2:09 a.m.
On Wednesday, the final passenger train to leave the system — a southbound No. 2 train — arrived at its last station at 2:12 a.m., four minutes late.
“Not bad, not bad, yes it’s a little tardy,” Mr. Zamora said.
By then, riders who were not already on the subway were trying to find other ways to get to work. Many turned to the bus network, which has been bolstered to accommodate the roughly 11,000 riders who have relied on late night subway service in recent weeks.
The transit agency has added 1,168 nightly bus trips — a 76 percent increase from the usual nightly bus schedules — and put 344 additional buses on the road, officials said. Buses were expected to arrive at stops every 15 or 30 minutes, similar to recent train schedules.
He was saved, he said, by a police officer who saw what happened and gave him a ride in his cruiser. They overtook the bus and Mr. Rodriguez was able to board at another stop.
“It was that or go back home,” said Mr. Rodriguez, who normally takes two trains to get to work. “I never use the bus, always the trains,” he added.
Around the same time, Yussef Said was waiting for a southbound M15 bus from his Upper East Side neighborhood. He had started working a 6 a.m. shift at an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island a month ago and had counted on catching the No. 6 train to the Staten Island Ferry — a plan that was upended by the subway shutdown.
On Wednesday morning, his goal was to make a 4:30 a.m. ferry.
“I have to catch anything I can,” Mr. Said, 40, said. “I want to work.”
At 5 a.m. caution tape still hung across entrances to the Jay Street-Metro Tech subway station in Brooklyn.
Allan Harris, 61, a mason from Red Hook, Brooklyn, was en route to a 7 a.m. construction job in Far Rockaway, Queens. The shutdown had already forced him to take a bus to reach the station.
“I catch the 61, took it to come here,” he said referring to bus line, “but I need to move from here now, you know?” As he stood behind the tape, the sound of a train could be heard and with that, Mr. Allan maneuvered over the tape and was on his way.
Nate Schweber, Sean Piccoli,Victor Blue, Azi Paybarah and Jonah Markowitz contributed reporting.
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