Posted by Delfina
on 6/29/2009, 2:33 pm
Back in the olden days when a very few of the buses were just beginning to be air conditioned, and most of them were not ... hoping and hoping that when the Q15 bus (the old 5th Avenue Line green bus) to the City came it just MIGHT (pretty please!!) be air conditioned. Usually it wasn't. So the next best was maybe, just maybe getting a seat by a window ... and hoping against hope that maybe, just maybe, the window might actually open. Usually you couldn't, and when you could, usually it didn't. (and since everything perpetually smelled like exhaust fumes in the City, why, exactly it mattered escapes me ... but it mattered.)
Ditto the old hot-box subway cars with the big metal ceiling fans that moved, when they moved at all, with all the speed of a somnambulistic turtle ... and some of the seats were still the old woven wicker that was ALWAYS broken right at the edge of the seast so it snagged hems and hose. I remember sometimes taking the subway to Nana's in Brighton Beach on the subway - much of the trip was elevated, and the el made it marginally more bearable - I remember that as we approached the Brighton Beach stop, the el made a big, sweeping, screeching curve, and every single passenger on the left side of the train would open their "seaward" windows for a breath of fresh(er) air.
263
Message Thread:
« Back to thread