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SEE LETTER TO THE EDITOR 6/12/92; 6/26/92
THE SCENE: Friday-morning rush, on the downtown platform at Broadway and 72nd Street. It's the start of a holiday weekend, so the off-to-work crowd is a little thinner than usual. But still, this is 72nd and Broadway at 8:20 in the morning, and that means sardine city.
"Can you imagine?" Robin Pokres is asking, a look on her face that settles somewhere between incredulity and fright. "Hundreds of more, thousands of more people in this station every day? Where do they expect us to go? I'll tell you where. We'll all be going over the edge."
Pokres does not normally tend to hyperbole. She is, in fact, a somber financial analyst, well educated and 44 years old. But twice a day, she comes through what is probably, inch for inch, the most densely crowded station in all the subway. The mere suggestion that this could worsen is enough to send many Upper West Siders over the (rhetorical) edge.
"The equation is easy enough to understand," Pokres said, before exhaling a bit over-dramatically and sqeezing aboard a downtown No. 2. "More apartments upstairs means people in the subway. Where exactly do you want to put them?"
There's a rule in the subway: upstairs always come down.
This is why crime-ridden stations are so often...