A typical rush hour commute home to the Upper East Side was turned upside down Monday evening, as hundreds of people found themselves bottlenecked into a single escalator at one UES subway station exit, forced to use it as a staircase when it stopped functioning due to an act of vandalism, Upper East Site has confirmed.
Typically, the 86th Street-Second Avenue subway station has two ascending escalators running 24-hours a day, seven days a week, at the exit at East 83rd Street and Second Avenue. On Monday evening, the middle escalator was already broken down and out of service, awaiting long term repairs, according to the MTA.
Around 6:05 pm Monday, the only functioning ascending escalator at that station exit — the one on the right — was vandalized when someone pressed the machine’s emergency stop button, a safety mechanism located on the escalator that brought the machine to a halt, the transit agency told Upper East Site.
Less than a half hour later, when commuters flooded the 83rd Street exit, they found themselves confronted with a choice, climb the steep staircase shoulder to shoulder or turn around, pay to get back into the station, walk three blocks underground to the 86th Street exit and use the functioning escalators or elevator at that location.
“I think a bunch of us were thinking everyone was waiting for the ‘working’ escalator,” explained Upper East Side resident Teresa Wang, “ Then we get to it, and it’s gated off, so it was a collective sigh of disappointment before we had to wait in line just to climb the broken escalator.”
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The MTA says it keeps out of service escalators blocked off from the public because using them as a walkway can pose a safety hazard.
On Tuesday, Upper East Site spotted contractors working to repair the middle escalator, which had been partially dismantled and whose internal mechanisms were exposed. They said that the middle escalator, in particular, at the East 83rd Street exit was known to mechanical issues and had been worked on by them several times before.
During these latest repairs, the escalator handrail was being replaced on the left side. The workers also noted the other escalators at that exit were not nearly as problematic as the one they were working on.
Broken escalators have been a chronic issue in the Second Avenue Subway stations since the line opened in 2017.
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Only three of thirty-two escalators were in service at last 95.2 percent of the time, the agency’s uptime goal, during the first fifteen months it was in operation, according to MTA’s Inspector General’s Office.
The middle escalator, currently undergoing repairs, is expected to be back online this Thursday, according to the MTA, while the vandalized escalator was inspected for safety issues and returned to service at 7:20 PM Monday night, about an hour and a half after the outage began.
“Everyone was just tired from long day of work on a Monday, Wang explained, “and [then] welcomed to the top of the escalator with rain.”
