Hamptons Subway Plans July 4 Celebration

SCENE ON THE SUBWAY

Alec Baldwin was seen riding the subway from Sag Harbor toward Bridgehampton last Monday at 6 p.m.

MAN WITH A LANTERN

On five occasions during this past week, a bearded older man wearing a crown of laurel leaves, a white robe, and sandals, has been spotted walking the tracks between the stations carrying a lantern. He has been seen in Noyac, in Bridgehampton, in Water Mill, in Quogue and in Amagansett, always doing the same thing, swinging the lantern as he walks along in the darkness – the lantern lights his way a little or at least keeps him from stepping on the third rail — looking directly in front of him and then at the last minute, jumping out of the way as the train rushes by. A philosophy professor from Harvard, Art Barnes, tells us he thinks this might be Diogenes, a Greek philosopher, searching for truth.  This is nonsense.

Please contact our main office in Hampton Bays if you see this man, as we wish to talk to him.

FREE SUBWAY TOKENS

Our new Public Relations Director Herbert Johan Ellis is starting things off with a bang with his free subway token giveaway. Everybody who buys a swipe card at the token booth will be given a paper bag with 50 tokens in it as a thank you for using the subway system. We have several million tokens in the basement of our headquarters on Ponquogue Avenue in Hampton Bays, all left over from the bygone days when tokens got you on the subway. They don’t do that anymore, and Ellis felt it was time to give them away as souvenirs to the customers. What are you going to do with your bag?

READ THIS JUST IN CASE

If the Supreme Court this week rules in President Donald Trump’s favor and he is indeed allowed to buy Hamptons Subway for $1 because of its strategic importance in preventing enemies from foreign countries from invading here, he will be invoking Executive Order 42,312. This order will allow for the removal of anyone from the following eight foreign countries taking the subway to be confined to a prison he is setting up in Wainscott until hell freezes over. The countries are Fiji, the Canary Islands, Beetlemania, Guacamole, Al Friedo, Canada, Bimini, and the Hot Chocolate Mountain Kingdom just south of Saudi Arabia, but not Saudi Arabia.

THE FOURTH OF JULY

Hamptons Subway celebrates the founding of our country this year with a special ceremony at 10 a.m. on July 4 on the Southampton platform to honor the founder of the Hamptons Subway, Ivan Kratz. Kratz, the legendary American businessman who constructed the system, was born on July 4, 1891. Subway Commissioner Bill Aspinall will talk about Kratz, the Quogue Marching Band will play, flowers will be strewn on the tracks by young girls at the appropriate moment – he was born at 10 a.m. – and a framed photograph of Kratz, bordered by bunting, will then be bolted to the subway platform wall directly opposite the Subway food concession. The subway escalators will be silenced during the ceremony.

It was in 1924 that Ivan Kratz won the bid to build the section of the Lexington Avenue Subway line between Houston Street and 14th Street in Manhattan. Although his bid was low, his construction costs ran over, largely because he had, we know now, double-ordered all the tracks, wall tiles, lighting systems and other material necessary to do the job.

In 1926, the City, smelling a rat, ordered an investigation of Kratz, who, in response, immediately ordered all the secretly stockpiled subway material trucked first to Staten Island, but then after the feds began to move in over there, out to the Hamptons and Montauk, where he buried it all underground in the familiar subway system configuration we know today. He was never indicted.

In 2007, the existence of the system was discovered when workmen in Sag Harbor dug down in a superfund cleanup beneath where a large gas storage ball was being removed by workmen, and with shovels struck the top of the underground roof of what turned out to be the Sag Harbor platform ceiling. The entire rest of the system was soon discovered – the diggers just walked through the tunnels – and the Hamptons Subway opened in 2008 to great enthusiasm.

The pluck, imagination, enthusiasm and perseverance of Kratz  is typical of the free enterprise system and the American way, which is what made this country great and the leader of the free world all through the 20th, and now 21st, at least for a while, century. And so we celebrate him and the gift he made to us of this subway system on the day and hour of his birth, the Fourth of July.

Come to the SoutHamptons Subway platform on July 4 at 10 am – the turnstiles, also silenced, will be free for passage from a half hour before to a half hour after – and hear Hamptons Subway Commissioner Bill Aspinall say these words.

(Note to Janet: We know Ivan Kratz was actually born on March 17, 1891. The commissioner knows that too. He wants it changed to July 4 in all references to him from now on.)

COMMISSIONER ASPINALL’S MESSAGE

I am off in Bermuda getting a much-needed rest. Back for Taste of Two Forks, guaranteed, since I’m using the company plane and there can be no delays since it’s use is all at my say-so.