NY Daily News
Nine homeless riders on the No. 2 train, evicted from their usual
all-night tour of the underground early Wednesday, toted their
belongings upstairs to a city bus soon cluttered with their garbage bags
and a handcart.
“I’m not going to a shelter,” shouted Tyronne Batte, 35, who struggles with drug addiction and spends many nights riding the rails. “I went five years ago. I got robbed. People tried to rape me three times. It’s like prison with fewer guards.”
Night one of the 1 a.m.-to-5 a.m. sanitizing sweep and shuttering of the sprawling subway system over coronavirus concerns sent more than 2,000 confused homeless people onto the streets and aboard city buses, with Mayor de Blasio declaring the policy imposed by Gov. Cuomo would remain in place for “a matter of months” at minimum.
“My general hope is that we’re going to see more and more normalcy through the next few months,” the mayor said. Asked specifically when things might change for the late-night trains, he replied,
“When the crisis is over.”
NYPD Chief of Department Terence Monahan said most riders knew what was coming, and “no one was really taken by surprise” that the nation’s largest subway system would not run on its round-the-clock schedule.
Batte loudly disagreed before leaving the Flatbush Ave.-Brooklyn College station for the B44 bus shortly at 12:55 a.m.: "They didn’t make any announcement on the train.” He declined help from a group of six homeless outreach workers before boarding.
Another policy failure decision by Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio.
