![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
A few articles
One about teenaged otaku in Queens.
At Queens Libraries, a Passion for Japanese Comics Endures
By ANNE BARNARD
Michael Jones, 15, is fiercely curious about all things Japanese. He is trying to teach himself the language. He reads about Japan’s mythology. And he wears his love for the country’s pop culture on his breast, literally — topping off an outfit of orange Nikes and jeans with a stuffed Japanese cartoon character, a toothy monster that dangles from the chest strap of the hulking backpack he rarely removes.
It all began with an obsession with Japanese graphic novels, one that Michael shares with a band of young readers who spend most of their afternoons at the Queens Library branch in Bayside. They divide their time among homework, video games and manga, the Japanese book-length comics that trace liquid-eyed, spiky-haired heroes and heroines through swooping ninja fights or dreamy romantic reveries, sometimes running dozens of pages of wordless action, like anime films viewed frame by frame.
Alana Govan, 12, scrutinizes the splashy black-and-white drawings for artistic inspiration, then fills her own sketchpad with mysterious disembodied eyes. Her classmate Samantha Laroque reads manga about “girly stuff,” to complement her favorite Anne Rice vampire novels. But Seung Koh, 11, declares that he never taints his diet of manga with what he disdainfully calls “ordinary reading.”
“With books, like, you only see words,” he said. “It’s so dull.”
They come from all over the ethnic patchwork of this neighborhood of modest-to-fancy brick houses and square green lawns: East Asian, South Asian, Caribbean, African-American, Jewish. (Only one speaks Japanese at home.) But at the library, they identify as otaku — Japanese slang for manga aficionados — and their divisions run purely along manga lines. Fans of shonen action manga challenge partisans of romantic shojo; experts debate the merits of series like Full Metal Alchemist, Death Note and Fruits Basket. Readers pool their knowledge to puzzle out magic spells, ninja moves and warrior codes that dominate the manga universe.
Manga clubs have coalesced in libraries in various Queens neighborhoods — Flushing, Jamaica, Long Island City — and the genre has colonized young-adult rooms in libraries around the country.
At least half a dozen Queens teenagers have seriously studied Japanese after getting interested in manga — some making sure to choose colleges that teach it, others using library books like “Japanese in Mangaland” and “Japanese the Manga Way,” said Christian Zabriskie, who as youth librarian at the Queens Library’s central branch in Jamaica drew up to 40 students to its weekly manga club meetings. One young woman discovered a love of languages and now studies Russian in college, Mr. Zabriskie said.
Others read about Shintoism or practice animation drawing. Some discover unexpected perspectives, like two girls who emigrated from very different places, Nigeria and Bangladesh, and became friends through manga, or Darren Laroque, 15, Samantha’s older brother, who issued a disclaimer — “I’m not trying to be all weird and stuff” — before confessing that he liked some “mushier” manga, with strong female characters, ostensibly directed at girls.
Mr. Zabriskie, 39, now assistant coordinator for youth services at Queens Library, says manga is for these teenagers what punk rock, New Wave, and Dungeons and Dragons were for his generation: a world of specialized knowledge that excludes adults and opens a private creative space for young people.
“This kind of secret, hidden knowledge gives them a power and an empowerment,” he said. “It’s this generation’s esoterica.”
But, he said, unlike other teenage rituals like graffiti or, at the extremes, gang membership, manga fandom increasingly happens at one of the safest places around — the library.
“Rather than seeking out things that may be harmful, having your secret coding be foreign literature that you read in the library is pretty great,” said Mr. Zabriskie, a lanky redhead who fell in love with comics as a boy and with manga in his 20s, when it hit the United States in the 1990s.
Back then, manga, a century-old Japanese art form that traces its roots to scroll painting, was sold at underground bookstores. Gradually, foreign publishers figured out how to package it, realizing that English-speaking fans would willingly read translations from right to left and back to front, as in Japanese, rather than enduring the absurdities that arise if printers flip the pages and produce mirror images, like samurai wearing their swords on their left side.
Then manga exploded, fueled by the popularity of Pokémon and anime. Japanese manga exports are valued at more than $429 million a year, about half of that in the United States, according to “The Rough Guide to Manga,” a manual whose 2009 publication was evidence that manga had entered the canon.
Now, librarians write books and journal articles to figure out how to tap into this powerful vein of interest that seizes early adolescents just at the age when they are most likely to drift away from libraries. Much like urban fiction and romance novels, manga has been embraced by librarians who say their job is not to judge what people read, but to give them what they want, engage them and later, perhaps, suggest other genres.
The Queens Library, the country’s largest by circulation, stocks thousands of manga volumes. At least 40 percent are checked out at any given time, and the most popular are taken out 60 times in two years before they fell apart, Mr. Zabriskie recently found by examining circulation records. That popularity rivals the blockbuster Harry Potter books. Mr. Zabriskie estimates that a third of the books left on library tables at the day’s end— the ones teenagers have pulled off the shelf to read for fun — are manga.
The manga mania, like so much else in the city during the recession, is threatened by budget cuts. Beginning in July, proposed cuts would reduce library staff by more than one-third and opening hours by nearly half, library officials say. Thirty-four community libraries would be open only two or three days a week. Mr. Zabriskie’s manga club, the borough’s largest, no longer formally meets; budget strains prevented filling his job after his promotion.
At the Bayside branch, though, a dozen students, a record crop, came to a meeting last month. Bayside is an economically diverse and educationally minded community. Its school population is half Asian, a quarter black or Hispanic, a quarter white. Thirty percent qualify for free lunch. But every child in the club reported having a computer at home.
At a table stocked with chips and apple juice, the youth librarian, David Wang, treated the students as expert consultants, scrolling through manga Web sites on a projector and asking them what titles to buy. They discussed plans to publish a manga newsletter — imaginary interviews with characters, lists of favorites —and eventually their own manga series.
William Guo, 13, wanted to know when Eyeshield 21, a manga series about football — American football — would arrive. “The exact day, please?”
“You keep coming in every day, and it will be here,” Mr. Wang assured him.
Like members of any passionate subculture, they debated purism: Most said they preferred reading manga on paper to its electronic form.
(William dissented: “I have to hide it from my parents because they don’t like me reading it.”)
Darren Laroque, who has the booming voice and authoritative delivery of a grown-up, said he liked books he read in school, like “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy. “Good and evil — I’m into that kind of stuff,” he said.
But he also finds resonance in manga characters like the morally dubious, trigger-happy hero of Death Note: “They have all the super strength, but deep down they’re still human,” he said.
One about people who jump onto the tracks to get stuff they've dropped. Apparently 90 people a year are struck by subways. I cannot even fathom that. NINETY PEOPLE? I would've thought half that, and that would've been generous!
It's stupid, of course. I have very little sympathy for them once they're down there. Whatever it is, it can be replaced. You can get another phone. You can get another ipod. You can get another bag filled with, as one person died trying to retrieve, stinky gym clothes and deodorant, and let me say that's the stupidest one yet. Unless it is your child down there, or your spouse (and while you CAN get another of either of those, I can appreciate that this isn't a comforting thought), it isn't worth your life. And everybody who does this thinks they're so clever and so fast that they can get back and nothing will happen, but this isn't a good risk. Some risks are good. And some are just stupid. Don't do it.
Leap to Tracks for Dropped Item? Think Again
By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM and REBECCA WHITE
Late one night, waiting for the subway after a Mets game, Sean Frawley dropped his cellphone and promptly watched its battery pop out and land, with an unhappy plunk, on the tracks.
It is a particularly vivid brand of urban nightmare, and, as Mr. Frawley recalled a couple of months later, only two thoughts crossed his mind: “I can either pay $300 for a new Blackberry, or I can jump down on the track.”
Mr. Frawley jumped.
The subway track bed, a four-and-a-half-foot drop from the platform, is a menacing morass of rats, garbage and lethal electricity. Mr. Frawley, 23, regretted his decision immediately.
At 6-foot-3, he thought he would have no trouble hopping out; instead, it took the strength of three strangers to haul him back onto the platform.
Mr. Frawley lives a block from the 36th Avenue subway station in Astoria, Queens, where, on Friday night, an 18-year-old named Beatriz Briceno took a similar leap to retrieve a jacket that had fallen to the tracks, witnesses said.
An N train roared into the station, injuring Ms. Briceno, who is from Hamden, Conn., and killing her companion, Jose Gomez, a 29-year-old Brooklyn resident who had jumped onto the tracks to help her.
To wary New Yorkers, the circumstances seem unthinkable: mortal danger in exchange for a replaceable consumer product. Yet Mr. Gomez was at least the third New Yorker in six months to die after an ill-advised foray to the tracks.
In March, a 48-year-old lawyer was crushed by a No. 6 train on the Upper East Side; she had hopped onto the tracks in pursuit of her nylon LeSportsac shoulder bag, which the authorities said contained gym clothes and deodorant.
In December, a 33-year-old music writer dropped his iPod onto the B train tracks at 110th Street. He jumped in and was killed instantly when a train entered the station. The victim’s mother was quoted by The Daily News as saying her son was “very young and kind of adventurous, so maybe he thought he could pull the iPod out of the tracks.”
Impulse, intoxication, love of risk: It is never clear why people put themselves in harm’s way. Those who have successfully retrieved items from the track say the behavior is more common than people think — but they almost always come to regret it.
“There are a thousand things you can do in this town that are, on paper, unwise,” said Thomas Beller, an author who wrote about his own foray to retrieve an iPod. (It took him two tries and a cut shin to make it out.)
“They could have tragic ends, but people do them all the time anyway,” Mr. Beller said, citing bicycling without a helmet and exploring Central Park in the city’s grimier days. When he told friends of his adventure on the tracks, “it was universally greeted as something that was totally nuts,” he said, adding, “It always get a laugh, but it’s a kind of nervous laugh.”
Mr. Beller, speaking on the telephone, was interrupted by his daughter, newly arrived since the subway incident. “Let me add,” he said, “that once you become a parent, the nature of those calculations changes.”
Transit officials say that in the event of a lost item, passengers should alert a police officer or transit worker, who can often arrange for a hook or net to retrieve the item.
“It’s just not worth taking the risk,” said Paul Fleuranges, a spokesman for New York City Transit. “In one instant the coast looks clear, and you think you can hop down, retrieve your item and hop back up. In reality, it’s not that simple.”
About 90 people are hit by subway trains each year, and about half the time it is fatal. But officials could not say how many cases involved an attempt to retrieve something.
“I think it happens more than you realize,” Mr. Frawley said.
Robert Russin, 45, who was walking outside the 36th Avenue station, recalled hopping onto the R track in Brooklyn in pursuit of his girlfriend’s keys, which he had dropped. “I thought I could get back up, but I couldn’t,” he said. After a stranger helped him out, he was handed a summons from a police officer on the platform. “I got a ticket,” he said, “but I deserved it.”
On Sunday, Mr. Gomez’s relatives gathered in the Brooklyn apartment he had shared with his mother since arriving in the United States from Venezuela three years ago. A Beatles fan, Mr. Gomez had recently been promoted to assistant manager at the Midtown restaurant where he worked, said his sister, Kimberli, 28.
The father of Ms. Briceno, who remains hospitalized, called to say that his daughter was “better than yesterday,” Kimberli Gomez said.
“She’s moving her legs and arms,” Ms. Gomez said, “but she’s not talking.”
Later, the relatives broke down in tears and hugged one another when they heard that workers at the Brooklyn Funeral Home, in nearby Cypress Hills, had read about the accident and offered to provide funeral arrangements for free. The family had feared being unable to afford a memorial. “You don’t have many humanitarians left in the world,” said Lorie Parker, a funeral director at the Brooklyn Funeral Home. “That was just a beautiful thing he did for someone else.”
At Queens Libraries, a Passion for Japanese Comics Endures
By ANNE BARNARD
Michael Jones, 15, is fiercely curious about all things Japanese. He is trying to teach himself the language. He reads about Japan’s mythology. And he wears his love for the country’s pop culture on his breast, literally — topping off an outfit of orange Nikes and jeans with a stuffed Japanese cartoon character, a toothy monster that dangles from the chest strap of the hulking backpack he rarely removes.
It all began with an obsession with Japanese graphic novels, one that Michael shares with a band of young readers who spend most of their afternoons at the Queens Library branch in Bayside. They divide their time among homework, video games and manga, the Japanese book-length comics that trace liquid-eyed, spiky-haired heroes and heroines through swooping ninja fights or dreamy romantic reveries, sometimes running dozens of pages of wordless action, like anime films viewed frame by frame.
Alana Govan, 12, scrutinizes the splashy black-and-white drawings for artistic inspiration, then fills her own sketchpad with mysterious disembodied eyes. Her classmate Samantha Laroque reads manga about “girly stuff,” to complement her favorite Anne Rice vampire novels. But Seung Koh, 11, declares that he never taints his diet of manga with what he disdainfully calls “ordinary reading.”
“With books, like, you only see words,” he said. “It’s so dull.”
They come from all over the ethnic patchwork of this neighborhood of modest-to-fancy brick houses and square green lawns: East Asian, South Asian, Caribbean, African-American, Jewish. (Only one speaks Japanese at home.) But at the library, they identify as otaku — Japanese slang for manga aficionados — and their divisions run purely along manga lines. Fans of shonen action manga challenge partisans of romantic shojo; experts debate the merits of series like Full Metal Alchemist, Death Note and Fruits Basket. Readers pool their knowledge to puzzle out magic spells, ninja moves and warrior codes that dominate the manga universe.
Manga clubs have coalesced in libraries in various Queens neighborhoods — Flushing, Jamaica, Long Island City — and the genre has colonized young-adult rooms in libraries around the country.
At least half a dozen Queens teenagers have seriously studied Japanese after getting interested in manga — some making sure to choose colleges that teach it, others using library books like “Japanese in Mangaland” and “Japanese the Manga Way,” said Christian Zabriskie, who as youth librarian at the Queens Library’s central branch in Jamaica drew up to 40 students to its weekly manga club meetings. One young woman discovered a love of languages and now studies Russian in college, Mr. Zabriskie said.
Others read about Shintoism or practice animation drawing. Some discover unexpected perspectives, like two girls who emigrated from very different places, Nigeria and Bangladesh, and became friends through manga, or Darren Laroque, 15, Samantha’s older brother, who issued a disclaimer — “I’m not trying to be all weird and stuff” — before confessing that he liked some “mushier” manga, with strong female characters, ostensibly directed at girls.
Mr. Zabriskie, 39, now assistant coordinator for youth services at Queens Library, says manga is for these teenagers what punk rock, New Wave, and Dungeons and Dragons were for his generation: a world of specialized knowledge that excludes adults and opens a private creative space for young people.
“This kind of secret, hidden knowledge gives them a power and an empowerment,” he said. “It’s this generation’s esoterica.”
But, he said, unlike other teenage rituals like graffiti or, at the extremes, gang membership, manga fandom increasingly happens at one of the safest places around — the library.
“Rather than seeking out things that may be harmful, having your secret coding be foreign literature that you read in the library is pretty great,” said Mr. Zabriskie, a lanky redhead who fell in love with comics as a boy and with manga in his 20s, when it hit the United States in the 1990s.
Back then, manga, a century-old Japanese art form that traces its roots to scroll painting, was sold at underground bookstores. Gradually, foreign publishers figured out how to package it, realizing that English-speaking fans would willingly read translations from right to left and back to front, as in Japanese, rather than enduring the absurdities that arise if printers flip the pages and produce mirror images, like samurai wearing their swords on their left side.
Then manga exploded, fueled by the popularity of Pokémon and anime. Japanese manga exports are valued at more than $429 million a year, about half of that in the United States, according to “The Rough Guide to Manga,” a manual whose 2009 publication was evidence that manga had entered the canon.
Now, librarians write books and journal articles to figure out how to tap into this powerful vein of interest that seizes early adolescents just at the age when they are most likely to drift away from libraries. Much like urban fiction and romance novels, manga has been embraced by librarians who say their job is not to judge what people read, but to give them what they want, engage them and later, perhaps, suggest other genres.
The Queens Library, the country’s largest by circulation, stocks thousands of manga volumes. At least 40 percent are checked out at any given time, and the most popular are taken out 60 times in two years before they fell apart, Mr. Zabriskie recently found by examining circulation records. That popularity rivals the blockbuster Harry Potter books. Mr. Zabriskie estimates that a third of the books left on library tables at the day’s end— the ones teenagers have pulled off the shelf to read for fun — are manga.
The manga mania, like so much else in the city during the recession, is threatened by budget cuts. Beginning in July, proposed cuts would reduce library staff by more than one-third and opening hours by nearly half, library officials say. Thirty-four community libraries would be open only two or three days a week. Mr. Zabriskie’s manga club, the borough’s largest, no longer formally meets; budget strains prevented filling his job after his promotion.
At the Bayside branch, though, a dozen students, a record crop, came to a meeting last month. Bayside is an economically diverse and educationally minded community. Its school population is half Asian, a quarter black or Hispanic, a quarter white. Thirty percent qualify for free lunch. But every child in the club reported having a computer at home.
At a table stocked with chips and apple juice, the youth librarian, David Wang, treated the students as expert consultants, scrolling through manga Web sites on a projector and asking them what titles to buy. They discussed plans to publish a manga newsletter — imaginary interviews with characters, lists of favorites —and eventually their own manga series.
William Guo, 13, wanted to know when Eyeshield 21, a manga series about football — American football — would arrive. “The exact day, please?”
“You keep coming in every day, and it will be here,” Mr. Wang assured him.
Like members of any passionate subculture, they debated purism: Most said they preferred reading manga on paper to its electronic form.
(William dissented: “I have to hide it from my parents because they don’t like me reading it.”)
Darren Laroque, who has the booming voice and authoritative delivery of a grown-up, said he liked books he read in school, like “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy. “Good and evil — I’m into that kind of stuff,” he said.
But he also finds resonance in manga characters like the morally dubious, trigger-happy hero of Death Note: “They have all the super strength, but deep down they’re still human,” he said.
One about people who jump onto the tracks to get stuff they've dropped. Apparently 90 people a year are struck by subways. I cannot even fathom that. NINETY PEOPLE? I would've thought half that, and that would've been generous!
It's stupid, of course. I have very little sympathy for them once they're down there. Whatever it is, it can be replaced. You can get another phone. You can get another ipod. You can get another bag filled with, as one person died trying to retrieve, stinky gym clothes and deodorant, and let me say that's the stupidest one yet. Unless it is your child down there, or your spouse (and while you CAN get another of either of those, I can appreciate that this isn't a comforting thought), it isn't worth your life. And everybody who does this thinks they're so clever and so fast that they can get back and nothing will happen, but this isn't a good risk. Some risks are good. And some are just stupid. Don't do it.
Leap to Tracks for Dropped Item? Think Again
By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM and REBECCA WHITE
Late one night, waiting for the subway after a Mets game, Sean Frawley dropped his cellphone and promptly watched its battery pop out and land, with an unhappy plunk, on the tracks.
It is a particularly vivid brand of urban nightmare, and, as Mr. Frawley recalled a couple of months later, only two thoughts crossed his mind: “I can either pay $300 for a new Blackberry, or I can jump down on the track.”
Mr. Frawley jumped.
The subway track bed, a four-and-a-half-foot drop from the platform, is a menacing morass of rats, garbage and lethal electricity. Mr. Frawley, 23, regretted his decision immediately.
At 6-foot-3, he thought he would have no trouble hopping out; instead, it took the strength of three strangers to haul him back onto the platform.
Mr. Frawley lives a block from the 36th Avenue subway station in Astoria, Queens, where, on Friday night, an 18-year-old named Beatriz Briceno took a similar leap to retrieve a jacket that had fallen to the tracks, witnesses said.
An N train roared into the station, injuring Ms. Briceno, who is from Hamden, Conn., and killing her companion, Jose Gomez, a 29-year-old Brooklyn resident who had jumped onto the tracks to help her.
To wary New Yorkers, the circumstances seem unthinkable: mortal danger in exchange for a replaceable consumer product. Yet Mr. Gomez was at least the third New Yorker in six months to die after an ill-advised foray to the tracks.
In March, a 48-year-old lawyer was crushed by a No. 6 train on the Upper East Side; she had hopped onto the tracks in pursuit of her nylon LeSportsac shoulder bag, which the authorities said contained gym clothes and deodorant.
In December, a 33-year-old music writer dropped his iPod onto the B train tracks at 110th Street. He jumped in and was killed instantly when a train entered the station. The victim’s mother was quoted by The Daily News as saying her son was “very young and kind of adventurous, so maybe he thought he could pull the iPod out of the tracks.”
Impulse, intoxication, love of risk: It is never clear why people put themselves in harm’s way. Those who have successfully retrieved items from the track say the behavior is more common than people think — but they almost always come to regret it.
“There are a thousand things you can do in this town that are, on paper, unwise,” said Thomas Beller, an author who wrote about his own foray to retrieve an iPod. (It took him two tries and a cut shin to make it out.)
“They could have tragic ends, but people do them all the time anyway,” Mr. Beller said, citing bicycling without a helmet and exploring Central Park in the city’s grimier days. When he told friends of his adventure on the tracks, “it was universally greeted as something that was totally nuts,” he said, adding, “It always get a laugh, but it’s a kind of nervous laugh.”
Mr. Beller, speaking on the telephone, was interrupted by his daughter, newly arrived since the subway incident. “Let me add,” he said, “that once you become a parent, the nature of those calculations changes.”
Transit officials say that in the event of a lost item, passengers should alert a police officer or transit worker, who can often arrange for a hook or net to retrieve the item.
“It’s just not worth taking the risk,” said Paul Fleuranges, a spokesman for New York City Transit. “In one instant the coast looks clear, and you think you can hop down, retrieve your item and hop back up. In reality, it’s not that simple.”
About 90 people are hit by subway trains each year, and about half the time it is fatal. But officials could not say how many cases involved an attempt to retrieve something.
“I think it happens more than you realize,” Mr. Frawley said.
Robert Russin, 45, who was walking outside the 36th Avenue station, recalled hopping onto the R track in Brooklyn in pursuit of his girlfriend’s keys, which he had dropped. “I thought I could get back up, but I couldn’t,” he said. After a stranger helped him out, he was handed a summons from a police officer on the platform. “I got a ticket,” he said, “but I deserved it.”
On Sunday, Mr. Gomez’s relatives gathered in the Brooklyn apartment he had shared with his mother since arriving in the United States from Venezuela three years ago. A Beatles fan, Mr. Gomez had recently been promoted to assistant manager at the Midtown restaurant where he worked, said his sister, Kimberli, 28.
The father of Ms. Briceno, who remains hospitalized, called to say that his daughter was “better than yesterday,” Kimberli Gomez said.
“She’s moving her legs and arms,” Ms. Gomez said, “but she’s not talking.”
Later, the relatives broke down in tears and hugged one another when they heard that workers at the Brooklyn Funeral Home, in nearby Cypress Hills, had read about the accident and offered to provide funeral arrangements for free. The family had feared being unable to afford a memorial. “You don’t have many humanitarians left in the world,” said Lorie Parker, a funeral director at the Brooklyn Funeral Home. “That was just a beautiful thing he did for someone else.”
no subject
no subject
It's a pity he's dead because of somebody else's stupid, stupid, STUPID mistake.
no subject
True that. Having a child revokes one's license to risk one's life for foolish reasons - that was a big factor for me in giving up xtreme wilderness sports; too much chance of coming home seiously broken, or not coming home at all, and my baby needed me. But 'subway diving' isn't even a sport, unless one considers competing for the Darwin Award to be 'sport'.
Sheesh, I don't know what makes these cityfolk think they can just jump or climb up a smooth four and a half foot concrete wall. A lot of people can't get out of a swimming pool without a ladder while standing at that depth. And don't the words DANGER HIGH VOLTAGE appear quite prominently all around the dangerous vicinity? What more do they need, LED displays all over the subways, playing continual videos of actual people being crushed or electrocuted?
However, I don't think it's fair of them to write:
"An N train roared into the station, injuring Ms. Briceno, who is from Hamden, Conn., and killing her companion, Jose Gomez, a 29-year-old Brooklyn resident who had jumped onto the tracks to help her.
To wary New Yorkers, the circumstances seem unthinkable: mortal danger in exchange for a replaceable consumer product. Yet Mr. Gomez was at least the third New Yorker in six months to die after an ill-advised foray to the tracks."
Mr. Gomez didn't put himself in mortal danger for a replaceable consumer product. He put himself in mortal danger to help his heedless young friend, and lost his life in saving hers. Poor girl, she's going to live her whole life with the knowledge that he died because she valued a jacket over her own safety - if any good comes out of this tragedy, it'll be that someone else remembers it in time to not jump down into a death-trap after a mere piece of 'stuff'.
There's got to be safer ways to help someone who's down there, than by jumping in after them. I suppose they can't put access-ladders in the sides, because then fools would just climb down them; nor can they have rescue-gear accessible to the public, because the public would steal it or misuse it.
Once on a very reckless free-climb, about a hundred feet up, my husband tied a knot in the sleeve of his army jacket, to use as a rope to help haul me about 5 feet up the cliff-face he'd eroded in his climbing up it - the difference was that the rock wasn't sheer or vertical, so I did have footholds, even though crumbling ones. Even then, at the peak of my youthful prowess, I don't know that I could have done it on a concrete wall - certainly not in city clothes and girly shoes - and I sure couldn't do it now. And most cityfolk don't climb; most women and many men haven't got the upper-body strength to do a single pull-up; even the sturdiest of well-knotted ropes might not be enough to help them, let alone a coat-sleeve.
If one had several jackets or sweatshirts, it might be possible to knot them together in such a way as to form a loop long enough for the person to get a foot into it, and so hoist them up that way. That's at least a two-person rescue, though, and probably more if the person is heavy, and the rescuers would have to be damn quick off the mark, to get the rescue-gear assembled and put the plan in action before the train came.
I wonder how many people would be reluctant to risk their jackets to accomplish such a rescue, and would instead insist on "just jumping down there and boosting them out".
no subject
There ARE stairs in at least some platforms, presumably to aid workers. They're roped off, but it's gotta be better than trying to hoist yourself up.
Sheesh, I don't know what makes these cityfolk think they can just jump or climb up a smooth four and a half foot concrete wall.
I don't think most people really realize how deep it is. You don't see people standing in there very often, and after all, it "only comes up to the floor of the trains!"
no subject
Still, I suppose it's true; four and a half feet doesn't seem very deep when you're sitting on the edge dangling your legs down, because the ground is only a couple of feet below your shoes. An easy drop, one you can make without hurting yourself, and then once you're down there, your head is still above the surface of the platform.
The problem is that your torso is not; in order to get up there you've got to get your waist up onto the edge of the platform, and unless you've got something solid to grab and pull yourself up with, or can jump that high, it ain't happening. There's no room to take a running leap, either, and you can't hoist yourself push-up style onto a ledge higher than your armpits (okay, maybe Cirque du Soliel can, but they're scarcely representative.)
Odd how a couple of feet down seems like a piddling distance, but the same couple of feet up can be literally unsurmountable.
no subject
You're never at that angle, though. When you see the train, it's either moving, or you're about to get on it.
It's still stupid, for all the reasons you mentioned, but inside it's hard NOT to think of the floor as being the bottom of the train, in the same way that a deep lake only goes up to the middle of the ducks.
no subject
Kind of a weird disconnect, watching the interest rise and the industry falter (piracy has a lot to do with it, I think but that's another subject entirely.).