Julianne Moore & Bart Freundlich Ride the Hamptons Subway

SCENE ON THE SUBWAY

Julianne Moore and husband Bart Freundlich were seen on a train headed for Montauk to attend an event at the library there. Saturday Night Live’s Colin Jost, who was one of the hosts at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner on April 27, was seen boarding the subway at Westhampton to head out to his home in Montauk.

LOW-COST HOUSING ON THE SUBWAY

The Hamptons Subway Board of Directors, headed up by Commissioner Bill Aspinall, has voted to offer to build low-cost apartment units inside the now abandoned freight storage facilities you see behind heavy steel doors along the sidewalls of all the subway tunnels.

We think such apartments will help end the low-cost housing crisis that is gripping the nation, and our area, because of sky-high real estate prices, making it impossible for local folks to continue to live here. Of course, the apartments would not be ideal. There are things to put up with — the lack of sunlight, the screech of the trains in the middle of the night, the lack of running water, and the only exits located either dangerously across the tracks or through the ceiling ductworks that lead up onto lawns and dunes throughout the Hamptons, providing ventilation to those below. However, there is considerable funding available because of the new East End tax on real estate transactions. Hamptons Subway wants to do its part.

TORONTO SUBWAY CARS

If you cross the platform and discover yourself boarding a rather beaten up and rusty subway car with the name “Toronto Subway” on the side, don’t be surprised. One year ago, we borrowed eight Toronto Subway cars during an emergency situation we had where we were short some of our own cars. When we were done with them, we tried to return them, but there was some kind of legal dispute that turned up, so they have remained here, on a siding at our Montauk yards for the past year.

Now we are short again due to some dastardly behavior on the part of four of our motormen, and we have the Toronto cars back in the system again for a while. They squeal louder than our regular cars. But you will get used to it.

HANG TEN

Hamptons Subway has begun cleaning inside the subway tunnel extensions that become operational from Memorial Day to Labor Day to take surfers, hang-gliders, swimmers and other beach bums from our downtown stations on Main Street in East Hampton and Southampton to the beaches at Main Beach and Coopers Beach, respectively. If you’d like to lend surfboards, framed photographs of beachgoers or palm trees in pots to decorate the interior walls of the tunnels, as is the custom every year, contact us.

COMMISSIONER ASPINALL’S MESSAGE

What a disappointment it is to come home from Anchorage, Alaska where I have been vacationing for the last three weeks, to find the service in such disarray. Well, I shall have this all-nighttime subway-car racing straightened out in no time. We are accepting applications from anyone in this community who knows how to operate a subway train. Four positions are open.

I heartily recommend an Alaska vacation to anyone. There are polar bears, ice and glaciers, and the scenery and people are fantastic. I am told it is better there in the summertime than the wintertime. I am planning to come back next winter to see for myself.

Next week, we will have an awards ceremony for the 26 summer workers who served as pushers last season, seeing to it that people got properly arranged in all the subway cars as the trains came into the stations to pick up the new passengers. All of last year’s workers have asked to come back this year, and so we have invited them to come and camp out on the roof of our Hamptons Subway building in Hampton Bays for the May 10–12 weekend — it’s illegal, but the town supervisor has said that she will pretend it is not taking place — to receive miniature gold-plated boxing gloves mounted on marble stands. The event will take place at 8 p.m. at our Hampton Bays office on May 11 if anyone would care to attend. The chief subway pusher, Kevin Bodkin of Sag Harbor, will receive for his efforts a special prize consisting of a $50 gift certificate from one of our local stores.