Missing Turnstiles

New York calls itself "the city that never sleeps," but that doesn't mean it ignores time cycles. It enforces its own cycles pretty ruthlessly, it seems. There's the infamous alternate-side-of-the-street parking rules, for instance, and the secondary and tertiary subway schedules that people learn for late evenings and weekends.

All of which leads up to that fact that on each of the past two nights I've had to walk across central Manhattan from 9th or 7th Avenue to Lexington in order to find an open stop for a subway headed in the right direction. Tonight I even had a British family ask me for advice on where to go since the 55th and 7th station had a gate chained across its turnstiles. Usually the only place British people ask me for directions is London, and they back away in embarrassment when they hear my accent. The family tonight had no idea what trouble they were in.