}
The L Train runs from 8th Avenue at 14th Street in Manhattan to Canarsie, Brooklyn, serving more a quarter million riders daily. Now, thanks to CBTC, or computer-based train control system, some L trains are driving themselves.
Officials say the change will allow trains to run closer together and more often, helping New Yorkers get around faster. Some things, though, won’t change: the trains will still have a motorman and conductor.
Rafael “Ralph” Moreno strides along a dingy Roosevelt Avenue sidewalk, his shiny black dress shoes more distinguished than their surroundings. A stout woman bundled in a North Face jacket thrusts a red flyer at him. “Immigration attorney!” she shouts in Spanish, loud enough to compete with the rumble of the No. 7 train above.
There was a different kind of solicitation on Roosevelt Avenue in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when prostitution and the cocaine trade were booming, according to news accounts from that time. Tired of headlines about Colombian criminals, Moreno enlisted in the fight against crime.
“To hell with this,” the Colombian immigrant remembers thinking to himself. “I’m going to clean up our name.”
He would wear sneakers as he strolled Roosevelt Avenue, to be “any guy,” he said. “Honestly, I looked like I wanted to go to bed with a prostitute.”
The FDNY’s plan to cancel night shifts at several firehouses — including one in Bushwick, which was ravaged by arson in the 1970s — is reawakening bleak memories and igniting new fears for some New Yorkers.
A pocket of Brooklyn has the highest juvenile crime rate in the city – and police say robberies of iPods, fancy cell phones and other expensive electronic devices are at least partly to blame.
“That’s the new thing,” said 84th Precinct Crime Prevention Officer John Kenny. “They just snatch it off your ear. The era of cell phones, BlackBerries, iPods – that’s the source of a lot of these robberies.” (more…)
