UNDERGROUND JUMPERS

Letting the subway do a suicidal person’s dirty work has always been in vogue. Just Monday, a man in his sixties, bent on self-destruction, jumped in front of a 6 train pulling into the Astor Place subway station. The conductor, seeing him on the tracks, stopped the train just in time. Suicide thwarted, briefly, he drove is head into the third rail to die of electrocution. Depressed New Yorkers (and there are a lot of them) are tempted every time a train pulls into the station—no wonder it’s so popularity: quick, public, accessible and cheap. The dank old subway stations aren’t exactly therapy treatment. According to the Vital Statistics from the New York State Department of Health, in 2003 the City reported 416 (predominately men, two to one) suicides. Drunken subway “accidents,” while hard to determine if suicidal, augment these numbers. For whatever reason—be it daily temptation or the ease—subways are still the City’s common denominator, even in suicide.