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Quotes: 'They completely missed the message that was pounded into their heads during the hearings about the station booths: Riders want human beings in the subways.' - Gene Russianoff, attorney for the Straphangers Campaign
People were filing into an elevator deep below Washington Heights early yesterday: teenagers in loose-fitting clothes; hospital workers in blue-green uniforms; bundled up dishwashers; and nattily attired club hoppers.
It was nearly 2 in the morning and, in upper Manhattan, the ride continues after the subway doors swing open. You trek to elevators through foreboding concrete chambers where the homeless sleep and drunks urinate. You come to a uniformed transit worker whose job involves pressing elevator buttons to lift you out of the deepest stations in New York.
"A free-for-all," the elevator operator at 168th Street was saying yesterday, predicting disorder at five upper Manhattan stations where the Metropolitan Transportation Authority plans to eliminate 22 of 50 elevator operators.
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