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The census yesterday morning at the 32nd Street entrance to the 1, 2 and 3 trains: Four men sleeping on spread-out pieces of cardboard.
One young woman named Gloria, dancing by herself to music from a Walkman. One wisp of a man holding what looked like a crack pipe.
Two other men over by the turnstiles, lingering for purposes unknown.
Dozens and dozens of morning commuters walking in silence through the stench and the squalor, eyes straight ahead, hoping they'll get safely to work.
Thirty-second Street, just east of Seventh Avenue. There is no grungier place in all of midtown Manhattan to enter or leave the subway.
It's worse than any of the subway entrances at the Port Authority. The Times Square station may have a greater number of felonies, all told. But not there - and not anywhere else in the city's commercial core - are the sleaze and the grime as well-packed as they are here.
"It's nice," said Irving Perry, a fidgety man with a small knot on his head, who is one of the regular crew. "It's somewhere you can be. Mostly, everybody leaves you alone."
Most of the people in the station, he said, have a taste for crack-cocaine. But it's "the kids from uptown and Brooklyn," he insisted, who do all the robberies and undeservedly spoil the reputations of others who just want to get high.
"Come in here at night," he said, "everybody be fighting and smoking and rolling around together on the floor. You get off just breathing the air down here."
As Perry was talking, a man in a blue windbreaker came up.
"Why shoot when you can shoot?" he said, talking rapidly and jerking his shoulders back and forth. He had a large box in his hands, wrapped in a...