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| Re: 42nd-34th/6th closed mezzanine.....what crime(s) occured there? (520931) | |||
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Re: 42nd-34th/6th closed mezzanine.....what crime(s) occured there? |
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Posted by El-Train on Wed Nov 21 23:12:48 2007, in response to Re: 42nd-34th/6th closed mezzanine.....what crime(s) occured there?, posted by Michael549 on Wed Nov 21 20:32:33 2007. Ah, found the news story again: apparently the passageway was closed back in early 1991:http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CEFDC1E39F930A15750C0A967958260 In the heart of midtown Manhattan, stretching from 34th Street to 42d Street, there is a little-known subway passageway used by as few as 400 people a day walking between stations or dodging bad weather. Last year, it was the site of dozens of crimes, and after a rape inside it in July, the transit police tried to close it. But their plans went into a bureaucratic shuttle between a local community board and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and were lost -- until Wednesday, when a woman was raped behind a pile of construction debris inside the tunnel. On Thursday, after the city police reported the rape of the woman -- a 22-year-old commuter on her way to a PATH train to New Jersey -- and reporters began to call about it, the Transit Authority declared an emergency and closed the tunnel on its own. And late yesterday, a Transit Authority spokesman said the authority would designate other dangerous passageways for closing next week. Yesterday, as padlocked gates barred both ends, a transit police spokesman tried to explain how it could have taken so long to close a passageway that the police clearly thought was dangerous and that many New Yorkers instinctively regarded as creepy. "The bottom line is that the transit police asked for it to be closed," the police spokesman, Albert W. O'Leary, said. "We should have been more forceful," And Jared Lebow, the Transit Authority spokesman, said officials had worried that any closing of a spot in the subways where homeless people sleep would provoke an outcry. But he conceded that they may have erred by not holding a quick vote on the police recommendation. That recommendation to close the path, which runs beneath the Avenue of the Americas, was first made after the July rape, Mr. O'Leary said. After another rape in August, the closing was sanctioned in September by the local community board and sent to the M.T.A. board. But Mr. O'Leary said that the closing was presented to the board as part of a larger package that included many operations changes. It was not even scheduled for a vote until next month. In October, there was a report of sexual abuse in the passageway, and in December, an attempted rape. Asked why none of these crimes warranted the kind of emergency closing that took place this week, Mr. O'Leary said the police had first decided to go through the usual procedures. The passageway is a sometimes rolling strip that extends nearly half a mile, past stairwells at 38th and 40th Streets. Mr. O'Leary said that the authority had long known of the dangers inside, as there had been 30 felonies there in 1990. As nightfall approaches, he said, many homeless people and drug dealers come to sit along the wall and sometimes harass people. The latest rape victim had entered the walkway at 5:10 P.M. Wednesday at 40th Street, on her way to the PATH train at 34th Street for a trip home to New Jersey. Just south of 38th Street, a young man grabbed her, Mr. O'Leary said. The man threatened to stab her and demanded money, then dragged her about 200 feet south, behind a pile of debris. "She indicated to detectives that he threatened to stab her if she screamed," Mr. O'Leary said. "But he never produced a knife." After he raped her, as she was hidden from view of perhaps a dozen commuters walking by, Mr. O'Leary said, he took the woman's radio, her wristwatch and an earring. As soon as he left, she began screaming, and a passerby chased the man, who got away. Mr. Lebow, director of public affairs for the Transit Authority, said yesterday that the decision to close the passageway had been delayed to allow for public hearings about service reductions systemwide. He said that closing the corridor without allowing for public comment would have caused an outcry from advocates for the homeless. But Mr. Lebow said that he did not know why a crime problem had been lumped with decisions about service cuts at the hearings. "We should have made an exception in this case," he said. |
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