It’s no coincidence that it’s done nothing but rain ever since the ribbon was snipped on the High Line railtrail park earlier this week. In fact, any student of elementary New York City demonology knows the story of Ezekiel Marcus, who perished on the West Side tracks in 1934.

Marcus was a Manhattan native, born in a cold-water flat in Hells Kitchen in 1899. He’d initially intended to pursue some sort of career in the arts; he attended the School of the Industrial Arts in the midtown 50s as a teen, but dropped out after a few years and embarked on a career on the railroad.

Prior to the High Line’s construction, the tracks ran ground-level along 10th Avenue, which was ridiculously dangerous for people who walked or drove in the area. For a short spell, Marcus was employed as what was known at the time as the “West Side Cowboy”–he would ride on horseback up and down the 20-odd blocks of 10th Avenue to warn pedestrians that the train was coming.

While his urban rustlin’ surely saved scores of lives, Marcus undoubtedly witnessed some ugly accidents too. Who knows how that scarred the young man.

The solution to 10th Avenue’s rolling death trap was the High Line–tracks built some 30 feet in the air. Zeke Marcus working unloading freight trains near Gansevoort Street for a number of years, before the West Side Cowboy himself–savior to countless pedestrians–met his early demise after a fall off the side of the High Line between Gansevoort and Horatio, on what’s now known as Washington Street.

It was December 1934.

Despite temps in the teens, several hundreds of people came out to raise a glass to the brave railroad man at a 10th Avenue saloon called Shebeen, about 100 feet from where Marcus perished. The spot wasn’t far from where he was raised, so when word spread of his death, Marcus’s friends and family came out in droves.

Jump ahead, oh, a half-century or so, and plans for a refurbished, publicly accessed High Line are but a glimmer in Joshua David’s and Robert Hammond’s eyes. A writer, David was researching a magazine story on the changing face of Chelsea when he says he was visited by an apparition in the tiny alcove in his Chelsea apartment where he did his writing.

“He had a long brown beard and wild brown eyes, and he wore a suede cap and black corduroy pants,” David told Beyond Investigation Magazine in 2002. “He told me in a gravelly voice to ‘leave well enough alone.’ I thought he was talking about my magazine article, but I think he realized the seeds for a bigger project were just beginning to sow in my mind.”

Indeed, David and Hammond met at a community meeting a month later in 1999, shared their mutual adoration for the old High Line, and got the (seemingly) Sisyphusian ball rolling on the park project.

Eighteen months later, it was Hammond’s turn to get a visit from Zeke Marcus. Hammond, a painter, said he was on the phone with the actor Edward Norton, an early champion on the High Line, in his apartment when the ghost of Marcus slipped through a heating duct in his kitchen.

“He told me the same thing he told Joshua–leave it alone,” Hammond told a class studying the paranormal at Penn State in 2006. “He said he’d make it rain every day if the place of his death was trampled upon by the masses. I dropped my damn cellphone and had to wait about 20 minutes before I collected myself enough to call Edward back. Even then, I was shaking like a leaf.”

It’s rained ever since Mayor Bloomberg and the High Line swells officially opened the park, and the forecast calls for rain every day for as long as the forecast goes.

Somewhere, West Side Cowboy Zeke Marcus is laughing.

[images: NY Times, The Guardian]

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and some of the still-remaining MTA bigwigs will assemble at the new Metro-North Yankee Stadium stop tomorrow at 12:30 to christen the new E. 153rd Street station.

Metro-North says  a “special, non-revenue train will leave Grand Central Terminal from Track 28 at noon” for media types; with the railroad’s current deficit, one is excused for thinking that all trains are non-revenue trains.

With his penchant for upstaging major public events, sources say Yanks slugger Alex Rodriguez will engage in batting practice while wearing leather chaps and a cowboy hat. He’ll hit from the Roberto Clemente Memorial Field across the street from the new stations; the field is a former Little League park that the Yankees bought up with taxpayer money so the players’ children can play wiffle-ball during Dad’s ballgames.

[image: Esquire]

The MTA has voted for its so-called doomsday budget that would see subway fare hiked up 50 cents and the commuter rails costing another 20-30%.

The latter would go into effect June 1. A commuter riding Long Island Railroad from Hicksville to Penn Station each day, reports the New York Times, would see his monthly nut go from $211 to $267.

As if living in a town called Hicksville wasn’t insult enough.

The budget now goes before the governor and State Senate, and the heavy posturing from the MTA begins in earnest. The downstaters will grovel for all they’re worth for the state to kick in dough to offset the service cuts–say farewell to the W and Z trains, among other transit things we take for granted–and price hikes. The pols will say they are flat broke.

The MTA board was almost unanimous in voting for the doomsday cuts.

After the authority’s board voted 12 to 1 on the fare and service changes, H. Dale Hemmerdinger, the chairman, said, “It’s now a fact, it’s done.” Speaking of state legislators, he said, “It can only be undone by actions that they will take, so we sure hope the pressure will build.”

The Times reports that Mayor Bloomberg is playing a more visible role in the fracas.

Mr. Bloomberg, who has poor relations with many Democratic legislators, initially avoided taking a prominent role in pressing the rescue. In recent days he has become more outspoken, calling on transit riders to demand action from their representatives.

“We do need mass transit and we do need affordable mass transit,” the mayor said Wednesday after meeting in Albany with legislators to discuss education issues. “Our city survives with that and can’t survive without it.”

I know it sounds crazy, but couldn’t Bloomberg write a check for, say, a billion from his personal account to tide the MTA over until its finances are in order? Wouldn’t that be a great, entirely selfless legacy for the mayor to leave behind–far more meaningful than that stupid football stadium on the west side that he’d pushed so hard for?

Mayor Bloomberg is 67 and he’s worth some $20 bil–the guy’s not going to spend it all by the time he passes on.

Bloomie loves the subways, and often makes the point that he rides it to work most days.

It’s just a thought.

There’s an interesting article in the Times today about Mayor Bloomberg getting serious about making life easier for bikers and encouraging them to bike to work. He’s bullish on building bike lanes–200 more miles by 2010!–and erecting bike racks.

The reporter gamely points out that Bloomie has only built two miles of lanes this year. But to be fair, the guy was tied up building that football stadium on the west side these past few years.

Funny Times story today about New York mayors and their love-hate-indifference relationship with the subway. Of course, there’s Mayor Koch, stepping out of the 1/9 at Sheridan Square, muttering “How’m I doing? How’m I doing?”

There’s John Lindsay, taking City Hall reporters along for mobile press conferences (not exactly Lyndon Johnson taking reporters into the White House bathroom while he did his business, but still). And there’s David Dinkins and Rudy Giuliani, who rarely rode the subway; perhaps because of their working-class roots, posits reporter Michael M. Grynbaum, they didn’t feel the need to pretend to mingle with the working class.

The Times unearths this minor gem about Mayor Bloomberg, who made quite a to-do about his insistence on riding the subway to work every day, despite his gazillionaire bank account. Bloomberg’s typical commmute consists of a chaffeured giant SUV ride to a midtown express stop 22 blocks from his Upper East Side home, then a shorter subway ride from there.

Keeping it real, Bloomberg-style.