The 51st Street Torture Chamber

Setting aside the few hedge fund managers and wealthy elite living in walled-off lives in the stratosphere of the Upper East Side, today was a typical 'too-much is too-much' day in Manhattan.

Its Sunday, right? Well I don't know. I had the misfortune of being in Mid-Town in the West 50's and decided to come home. The streets were filled with loads and loads of those people we know don't live here: tourists, bridge and tunnel voyeurs, and all the other errata of the human genome that doesn't fit, just walking mindlessly in seemingly endless mobs. Walking and walking, sometimes standing mindlessly in the middle of the sidewalk, sometimes peering up at traffic lights (Science's latest invention to prevent cars from colliding they didn't know about).

What is MidTown West about anyway? Its as if Mayor Guiliani, being the prosecutor that he actually is (and not the Mayor he thinks he was), thought merging businesses and tourism was some great idea. What's it got us? A bunch of office workers colliding with a bunch of tourists/shoppers and and its just CONGESTION and not "synergy" or whatever the frickin marketing crap was that coincided with the bad choice to allow monster office buildings in Long Acre Square. Cleaning up the Ho's on 42nd street was replaced by people falling all over each other.

Is there some special benefit to jamming office workers and tourists into the same space? Yes - the corporations that relocated out of MidTown's Plaza District got a big cut in real estate costs. But as typical the Citizen must pay for this - its the office worker who now has to stand in the spectacle of utter tourist bullshit day in and day out. Its like you're now a service worker, forced to see all the gimmicks and stimulus meaningful to the *FIRST EVER TO MANHATTAN* tourist slob. It wears thin even for the tourist in about 1 week. Imagine what it does to all of us who have to push through the crowds, the signage, the hawkers, the pedicabs, all that crap, just to get down to a roasting hot subway platform.

Speaking of which, what is it with the 51st Street Station of the 1/9 Train anyway?! That frickin train station must be a ConEd STEAM PIPE interchange or something. NEVER go down there with clothes on, or at least only in February when its 10 degrees outside - the heat will melt you down into a whimpering beggar, hoping for an end to the torture. Your dry cleaner loves the 51st Street Station.... how many thousands of victims must suffer in its holds and deliver their sweat-soaked garments to the cleaners? And what unfortunate workers must handle those smelly garments?

I see now the image of Vincent Price, in his black shroud peering down at us in his role as Sebastian Medina - Medievil Inquisitor - as he waves his arms around the Pit and the Pendulum - "Die my dears from sheer heat exhaustion, or end it all now, and throw yourself under the razor edge of Death...the wheels of the 1/9 Train."

And the architect of this municipal mess wants to be President of the US? Come on, Guliani was a flop at Planning. He's a crime-stopper, nothing more. Let's give him a post in NYC, but leave the prosecutor out of the White House. We already have enough problems with Attorneys General as it is!

I say tear down the 51st Street Station, and install the 51st Street IceBox that just happens to have a train track and platform running through it! Why all that money being spent on the 2nd Avenue subway could be pruned a bit, siphoned off in some creative accounting scheme, and re-directed to the Torture Chamber.