(Originally published by the Daily News on December 21, 2005.)
Millions of New Yorkers were forced to hoof it over bridges, jam into cars with strangers and brave the bitter cold on bicycles yesterday after city bus and subway workers went on strike – and were promptly slapped with a $1 million-a-day fine.
In the morning, Mayor Bloomberg joined the throngs walking across the Brooklyn Bridge and lashed out against “selfish” union officials for staging the first transit strike in a quarter century – stranding 7 million riders at the height of the holiday season.
“There is an illegal strike going on and until the workers go back I don’t think anybody should be negotiating anything,” Bloomberg said. “You can’t break the law and then use that as a negotiating tactic.”
Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Theodore Jones appeared to agree, holding the Transport Workers Union Local 100 in contempt and ordering it to pay a million bucks for each day the 33,700 workers are out.
Under the state’s Taylor Law, workers already face individual fines of two days’ pay for every day they strike.
With evening temperatures in the 20s, the evening rush hour was glacial in more than just its pace. Crowds overflowed and tempers flared at Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal, as homebound commuters scrambled for seats on Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North trains.
Bloomberg said the walkout was having a “devastating” impact on businesses with Christmas just days away – part of an estimated daily $400 million hit on the city’s economy.
“Nobody knows how long this strike will go,” he said. “If cooler heads prevail [this] morning, they will go back to work. If they choose to make it longer, the impact on this city will grow.”
TWU President Roger Toussaint gave no sign of giving up – not even after TWU International President Michael O’Brien publicly called on the strikers “to cease any and all strike or strike-related activities and to report to work.”
“These negotiations are about having some respect for our members, transit workers,” Toussaint said. “It’s unfair and insulting to describe us as thugs and the like.”
MTA officials and Toussaint said they were open to talk, but there was no immediate movement as New Yorkers braced for another day of hell. While a mediator from a state labor board met separately with union and MTA officials, workers remained defiant.
“If you’re going to walk, you have to strike when the iron is hot,” said Alma Heath, a 65-year-old station agent at Hoyt St., Brooklyn, who was picketing the Flatbush bus depot. “We’re out to win.”
Just after the TWU turned down the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s last contract offer early yesterday, Toussaint asked New Yorkers for understanding and accused the MTA of bargaining “in bad faith.”
Even though the MTA backed off plans to raise the pension eligibility age for new hires, union officials balked at increased pension contributions for new hires.
Many straphangers had little sympathy for the strikers in this traditionally pro-union town.
“What are these transit workers crying about?” asked Mary Dykes, 60, as she shivered on the corner of W. 98th St. and Broadway with her grandson, Nicholas. “They have it better than most. Most of us can’t retire until we are 65 or 70.”
Even on its own Web site, the TWU was battered by hundreds of scathing E-mails from furious riders like one who wrote, “If I could meet the masterminds behind this strike, I’d personally spit in each of their faces.”
While there was not any immediate word of major strike-related incidents, city officials blamed the walkout for an accident that sent Queens Police Officer Norris Cordova to the hospital with minor injuries. He was hit by a truck while directing traffic near checkpoints set up outside Shea Stadium.
It was 3 a.m. when workers began locking turnstiles, shuttering subway entrances and shutting down the nation’s largest mass transit system.
At one subway station, a worker left a handwritten sign that read, “Strike in Effect. Station Closed. Happy Holidays!!!!”
Most New Yorkers didn’t find out until they woke up that the strike they had hoped against was on. Across the city, transit workers took to the picket lines with signs that read, “We Move NY. Respect Us!”
City officials had prepared contingency plans in the event of the strike, complete with roadblocks and other measures to keep cars out of Manhattan. But while some major arteries were gridlocked, and thousands of riders clamored to board already overburdened LIRR train cars, the widespread chaos that many officials feared didn’t happen.
Thousands of commuters simply called it a day and stayed home. Traffic at the Lincoln and Holland tunnels was about half of the usual volume. Many Manhattan streets were eerily quiet.
Attendance at schools, which opened two hours later, was down in the city, officials said.
The millions who did venture into the city used a little New York ingenuity and pluck to scrounge a way to work.
They lined up for cabs outside Penn Station and shared rides.
They huddled together against the cold at designated spots for company vans and buses and car pools to shuttle them to their offices. And when all that failed, some stuck out their thumbs and hitchhiked.
Elsa Cortez, 58, of Kensington, Brooklyn, relied on the kindness of a co-worker she had never met before to get to her job at Bellevue Hospital.
“I wrote ‘Bellevue’ on a piece of paper so she would recognize me when she saw me,” Cortez said as she waited for her ride at a Brooklyn intersection.
Kathi Connell, 49, relied on her feet to get her from Gramercy Park to her job at Weill Cornell Medical Center. “It’s a pain in the a–,” Connell said as she shlepped 50 blocks through the bitter cold. “Right around Christmas. It’s a good thing I finished my Christmas shopping.”
Getting home was no picnic either, as exhausted commuters trying to escape Manhattan now had to contend with dropping temperatures, the darkness – and one another.
“I won’t be doing this tomorrow,” said Natasha Walker, 24, of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, as she jostled for place on an LIRR train at Penn Station.
All day long, confused tourists besieged police officers for information about getting around town. At Grand Central Terminal, an officer told a befuddled Belgian studying a subway map, “Throw that thing away.”
In Queens, straphangers who usually ride the subway to Manhattan waited for hours in the cold to board LIRR trains.
Not all the public transportation was affected by the strike. Commuter rail was up. Green line buses were running in Queens, and driver Mark Pelaez heard cheers when he pulled up at a Kew Gardens stop.
“I feel bad for all the commuters, this really hits them hard this time of the year,” said Pelaez, who has been driving the Kew Gardens to Kennedy Airport route for 20 years. “But I also feel bad for the drivers.”
Not every New Yorker was dismayed by the developments.
Grinning from ear to ear, 67-year-old Charlotte Karcher marched across the Brooklyn Bridge from her home in Brooklyn Heights to her gym in lower Manhattan – then back again.
She said she was buoyed by hardy fellow New Yorkers.
“It’s a New York moment,” she said. “But who knows if that feeling of fellowship lasts beyond the first day?”
pdonohue@nydailynews.com
