Living the dream: Staten Island commuters no longer have to climb all those stairs to get to SI-bound ferries

What's the big deal? you ask. So there are escalators going up from street level to the "business" level of the Manhattan-side Staten Island Ferry Terminal? Well, it's a huge deal for Staten Island commuters, who have had to make the long climb up the stairs for the year and a quarter since Superstorm Sandy destroyed those escalators. Someday we hope to have down escalators too!

by Ken

I know that other people's disasters have a limited shelf life, and become intensely uninteresting when they overstay their welcome. So I'm confident that nobody outside the Superstorm Sandy-afflicted area wants to hear any more about it. Nevertheless, I feel obliged to spread the word that no, we're not all OK -- that in particular areas and facilities that were both low-lying and right in the path of the storm surge took hits from which a year and a quarter still isn't enough time to recover.

In case you didn't make the connection to the accounts of the shakedown artistry we're learning was practiced by the administration of NJ Gov. Kris KrispyKreme, officially designated as the World's Largest Scumbag, toward the city of Hoboken, most of Hoboken qualifies as both low-lying (barely above sea level) and right in the path of the storm surge. So tell me what you would do if you had substantial control of the pursestrings for Sandy relief to localities, especially a locality with a Democratic mayor. You know perfectly well what you'd do -- you'd hold the fuckers up for ransom, the price being support for one of the scumbag development schemes for which you serve as de facto broker for the interested party of high-class scammers. Isn't that what anyone would do? As a fringe benefit, those several hundred extra pounds of blubber you're carrying quiver like a giant damful of Jell-O with your accumulated hilarity at the scams you and your KrispyKronies are pulling off. Oh, it's great to be the Boss!

Even where there's no such obstacle of powers-that-be extortion, a lot of the post-Sandy rebuilding is wearily incomplete. And perhaps it's not all that surprising that it's just this week that up escalator service was restored at the Manhattan-side terminal of the Staten Island Ferry, which carries ferry passengers from street level up to the actual passenger-terminal space -- or at least used to. As New Yorkers have come to know only too well, escalator repairs may be the most tortured and torturous of all infrastructure repairs to accomplish.

I realize that we're not the only city with escalators, and I assume that when escalators go on the fritz in other cities, they're just as hard to repair, which often seem to required the building of a new factory in one of the more remote former Soviet republics, which if all goes well may be accomplished in less than five years. But New York is such an intensely vertical city that hardly any facet of life carries on without working escalators. The pair at my gym, which would raise and lower patrons two stories if they were moving, have been out of order since roughly the time that President George Washington took the oath of office right next door at the original Federal Hall.

(Speaking parenthetically, I have to wonder how the apparently Stone Age state of escalator maintenance is going to affect the largest NYC infrastructure undertakig of modern times, the Long Island Rail Road's revolutionary East Side Access project, which will bring Manhattan-bound LIRR trains into Grand Central Terminal for the first time, in addition to their traditional Penn Station venue. This is being accomplished with the excavation and construction of a whole new lower level for Grand Central, which in addition to being a roughly zillion-dollar project in its own right will depend on fleets of escalators connecting sort of Journey to the Center of the Earth-style to this new lower level, roughly a hundred stories and a thousand feet below the surface of the planet. Since according to normal escalator-service guidelines roughly 90 percent of the escalators will go out of service in the first week, and then require several years for restoration of service, many Long Island commuters are likely to take to carrying mountaineering equipment to make the ascent from their trains to the street.)

For Staten Island commuters, the news doesn't get much sweeter than it did this week. Now some of the are probably daring to fantasize about escalators that go down. Well, it's always good to have a dream.

Staten Island Ferry Terminal Escalators Fixed, More Than a Year After Sandy

By Nicholas Rizzi on January 31, 2014 10:32am

ST. GEORGE -- More than a year after they were knocked out of service by Hurricane Sandy, the "up" escalators at the Whitehall Terminal were turned back on this week.

The escalators at the terminal suffered extensive damage in the storm and needed to be completely rebuilt, a spokesman for the Department of Transportation.

After a lengthy procurement process and a wait for parts to be built, the DOT was finally able to turn on the ascending escalators Tuesday night after an inspection.

"[E]scalators are finally fixed at the ferry terminal!" @aokiari tweeted.

"Today was the unveiling of the the new escalators at the Staten Island ferry. 1.5 years later? [I]t's about damn time," @jajogandia tweeted.

The DOT also added LED-lights to the sides of both of the up escalators in repairs.

The "down" escalators are still being fixed. DOT officials did not say when they expect to return those to service.

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