TEN miles later, Hazel Pagoada ran out of good humor, body heat and the use of her feet. Her mind was going next.
“Jesus Christ. I can’t take it anymore!” the ordinarily genteel, 18-year-old college student exploded as she crested the Brooklyn Bridge on foot, schlepping a large bag of cupcakes for her classmates. They looked about crushed.
“I’m cold. I’m tired!” complained Hazel, who started her day just after dawn from 96th Street in Manhattan – an excruciating journey that tested even the youngest legs.
New Yorkers rose early yesterday, and began to walk. And walk. And walk. And walk some more.
Actually, a man dressed in a red Santa suit, bells on his ankles, jogged across the bridge – no doubt to generate warmth – delighting cold hoofers who cleared him a path.
“Yo! Santa!” they shouted in fluent Brooklynese.
In this rare city where people are accustomed to using their feet as both a mode of transportation and a method of recreation, New Yorkers hit the old Brooklyn Bridge yesterday morning with a dollop of good nature.
But with each mile walked, with each blast of frigid wind, that commodity was running scarce. “I think the workers are greedy,” said Hazel. Others reserved far harsher words for the Transport Workers Union.
As they progressed, it dawned on the walkers, many of whom fall into the have-not category, that people in the union are doing far better than they are. And still, they moan.
Most people these days must work to get paid, are required to contribute to their health insurance, if they’re lucky enough to get it in the first place – plus, they can’t look forward to retiring with a pension at age of 55. A mockery.
“I understand they want to get paid more, but we’re really suffering!” said Natalie Neptune, 24, as she walked with her brother from East Flatbush to her job at Channel 13 at 33rd Street and 10th in Manhattan.
Natalie was unaware, until I told her, that transit bosses had increased their offer of a wage hike to 10.5 percent over three years. It sounded pretty good to her.
Trudging uptown on my own two legs, I was startled to see that normally teeming Chinatown and SoHo looked as if the world had ended. You could have rolled a tumbleweed down the sidewalk, and no one would have noticed.
At Grease, a boutique on lower Broadway, manager Mardia Nasraty, who lives in Woodside, Queens, was sick with worry.
From the 59th Street Bridge, she paid a taxi driver $30 for a shared ride downtown to the nearly empty store. “How much do we have to make to pay $60 round-trip each day?” she said frantically.
And then she came to the conclusion that suddenly struck a lot of New Yorkers yesterday. “No one is thinking about anyone else.”
We survived Day 1. How much more can we take?