Hamptons Subway Georgica Station to Open for Summer

SCENE ON THE SUBWAY

Howard Stern’s wife Beth Ostrosky Stern was spotted on the subway riding from Sag Harbor to East Hampton last Saturday morning. Some people thought she was on her way to the grand opening of the new pet store on Main Street in East Hampton. Others said she was off to the “Lunch” Fish House in Napeague, but because of the crowds that day nobody was able to keep track of where she got off.

MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE’S VISIT

Margerie Taylor Greene, the right wing congresswoman from the little town of Alpharetta, Georgia, has recently been seen traveling around the country with her entourage, visiting bowling alleys, motorcycle gang conventions, shrimp boat docks, and Walmarts to be with her “people.” She also came out to the Hamptons last week to visit the little fishing shack she owns in Hampton Bays and sit in her rowboat to be photographed “fishing.” She also visited the Hamptons Subway building on Ponquogue Avenue and ate a hoagie in the cafeteria with some of the workers, then walked down to the Hampton Bays subway platform across the street to be photographed next to a subway train.

ANNUAL AUCTION

The Hamptons Subway maintenance crew, which has been collecting debris and other junk from the subway tunnels for the past year, will hold its annual auction next Thursday at 4 p.m. in the lobby of the Hampton Bays headquarters. Items include an unused Kleenex box, magazines, baby bottles both full of milk and not, car keys, and wedding rings. This is the 17th year this auction has been taking place and it’s hoped that there is a bigger turnout than in the past and that more of this stuff is sold than before. Recycling is a big part of saving our planet, after all.

DISCOUNTED RIDES FOR A YEAR

Straphangers can now have a microchip embedded in their arm that will allow them to go through the turnstiles without having to swipe a subway card. The procedure can be performed by any doctor in the community licensed by Hamptons Subway to do the job. Cost of each trip using the chip, during the first year, is $1 instead of $2.75 deducted from a prearranged credit card. (The secretaries in your physician’s office are also trained to do this.) The volunteers who tested these chips in a three month preapproval test (required by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority) say that the chips also work on the turnstiles of the Atlanta subway system, and, surprisingly, also work to open certain hotel room doors and locked cars in Manasquan Beach, New Jersey.

GEORGICA STATION REOPENS

As it does every summer, the Georgica station, the most elegant of our stops, will be open to the public on June 15. Of course, “the public” only includes those wealthy people who live near this stop. Their identification cards feature Wi-Fi software that, when tapped during the approach to Georgica from either direction, will cause the subway to stop there. On the platform is a string quartet, a hot tub, servants with wet towels, and waiters serving personalized snacks such as chopped liver, caviar, wine, cheese, and hot coffee. The stop is lit by candlelight and responds to being ordered open at any time day or night. All other stops close for the night at 2 a.m. when the maintenance crews come out to do their work until 5 a.m. Georgica maintenance goes on 24/7 so there’s no need to shut it.

PIPING PLOVER PROBLEM SOLVED

As reported last week, flocks of endangered piping plover birds were repeatedly seen fluttering around in a tunnel between East Hampton and Wainscott. If they nested on the tracks, the subway would have had to shut down. Due to the creative thinking of Bobby Benton, a messenger trainee at our Hampton Bays headquarters, it was decided to temporarily remove two vent gratings on the ceiling of the tunnel there that sit flush in the ground above. One of them was on the front lawn of a billionaire who will remain nameless in this account, who had had his gardener cover the vent with sod some years ago. When asked to remove the sod, therefore, the chief of staff of that property refused to remove the sod after phoning the owner in Biarritz, France. But the other vent, uncovered and on an adjacent person’s property, was successfully removed and as a result the piping plovers, bless them, flew away.

COMMISSIONER BILL ASPINALL’S MESSAGE

I was privileged to have an invitation to meet with Marjorie Taylor Greene when she was at her fishing shack in Hampton Bays last Thursday. It came at the last minute, and so unfortunately, I had to leave one of our monthly meetings with disgruntled subway passengers. When you get an invitation like this from a great woman, you do what you have to do. But when I got to her fishing shack, her rowboat was there along with all her household help, but Marjorie was nowhere to be found. She’d gone off in her tour bus to meet with some unemployed blue-collar workers at a bar in Mastic Beach.   She’s an impulsive woman, that Marge. She gets my vote.

On another matter, the subway gratings, all put in during the subway’s construction in 1931, sit on people’s lawns above the vents over the tunnels and platforms in the Hamptons. They have never been surveyed, but I am now ordering our subway officials to locate them and produce a map where their locations can be identified. It is against the law to cover these grating vents. We will soon complete a survey to see what’s what.