A Transit Plan Brings Hoots and Hate

The Loew’s Paradise Theater, a sumptuous picture palace on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, opened in 1929 with a talkie called “The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu.” The most recent offering, on Wednesday night, might well have been called “The Great Bus and Train Disaster.” It was not a movie. Sadly, this was reality.
The landmark is simply called the Paradise Theater now. The Loew’s part — pronounced “Lo-eez” by generations of Bronxites — is long gone. For many years, the theater itself seemed a goner, a victim of vandalism and neglect. But it has undergone a glorious restoration. It looks almost as good as it did in its prime, with caryatids and cherubs all around, evoking an Italian Baroque garden.
That was the ornate setting on Wednesday for board members of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. It was the Bronx leg of their road tour to hear what New Yorkers think of plans to slash train and bus service to plug an enormous hole in their budget. Everyone knew going in what the several hundred people who showed up would think. They hated everything.
They hated the idea of eliminating bus routes. They hated shriveled train runs. They hated threats to the Access-a-Ride program. They really hated a plan to eliminate free MetroCards for students.
Some people relied on sarcasm. John Rozankowski took the board members to task for, in his view, valuing “high-tech gimmicks” over basic services. He drew laughs from the crowd as he slipped into alliterative high gear and rolled his R’s to denounce the authority’s “myriad menagerie of mechanical marvels.”
Some packed an emotional wallop. John Rose brought the vast Paradise hall to silence. Seriously disabled, Mr. Rose spoke with extreme difficulty from a wheelchair, his words often hard to discern. But he was quite clear when he said, “It is inconceivable for the M.T.A. to balance its budget on the backs of those who are most vulnerable.”
Naturally, politicians appeared, wearing shades of outrage. First up was the Bronx borough president, Rubén Díaz Jr. He urged the board members to find new solutions and to “put aside all the gossip and bochinche up in Albany.”
But how is it possible for anyone to put aside the bochinche, Spanish for gossip? It isn’t bochinche at all. What’s happening in Albany is a desastre.
Gov. David A. Paterson, more hapless and hopeless by the day, has tried to cast himself as the world’s most misunderstood victim, a man beset by unfair rumors and hostile forces. But the real victims of Albany’s chaos are ordinary New Yorkers, including those who depend on trains and buses.
The hearing at the Paradise reinforced that point. Riders’ needs have gone untended in the state capital. And why? In part because of the political paralysis that Mr. Paterson has gone far to create.
WHATEVER the transportation authority’s failings, its troubles hinge to a considerable extent on the chronic failure of state and city politicians to provide anywhere near enough money to sustain bus and train operations. Those free cards for students that sparked so much political huffing and puffing? Albany used a cleaver to chop its support for them. City funds for the authority have been static since 1995.
“Transit funding is a political problem,” said Veronica Vanterpool, associate director of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, a nonprofit group that advocates for mass transit. It is time, she told the board members, for Mr. Paterson and the Legislature to “step it up.”
Don’t count on it. People in the audience on Wednesday clearly recognized the politicians’ hand in the transit crisis.
There were hoots when an aide to State Senator Pedro Espada Jr. rose to speak and explained the senator’s absence. “He’s doing the people’s work in Albany,” the aide said. There were more hoots when he read a statement from Mr. Espada demanding that the authority give “a full accounting of its financial records.” This from a politician whose murky finances have sparked endless investigations. People knew chutzpah when it walked right up to them.
Even if the political posturing provided scant inspiration, the theater setting did. If the Paradise could reclaim some of its old grandeur, there was no reason to write off the transportation authority as beyond a comeback if it could get some help.
Whether any amount of restoration can save Mr. Paterson is by now another matter.