This article was scraped from Rochester Subway. This is a blog about Rochester history and urbanism has not been published since 2017. The current owners are now publishing link spam which made me want to preserve this history.. The original article was published July 22, 2009 and can be found here.
Remember the movie Stand by Me
? As I recall there's barely a plot... four young teenage boys search the countryside for the body of a reported missing person. Along the way they drink, they smoke, they nearly get run off of a railroad bridge by a speeding locomotive yada yada yada. Everyone who's seen Stand By Me loves it for the same reason--it beckons to a time in our lives when we're just drifting along in search of a good thrill. A few weeks ago I got an email from a guy named Russ and his story immediately brought back images of that Corey Feldman flick. Russ' story may never be made into a Stephen King novel or a Hollywood movie, but it takes place inside the Rochester Subway tunnels--between 1965 and 1968--and it's just plain fun.
Take it away Russ...
"When i was a kid we would play in the subway all the time. We would go in from Broad Street
behind Nick Tahoe's
or Brown and Broad St. We would get cat tails and put gas on them and used them like torches and walk in to the tunnel and come out at the ticket booth near Court St.
where the archs
are. Sometimes we would jump off the wall at Jay St.
or Charles St.
on top of a freight train (NY Central surface line) and ride down through the tunnel to Scio St.
and then walk back or hop a train and ride back. Their are great big steel doors in the subway where they would unload freight to the stores from boxcars. There is also a pond in there by the ticket booth.
I can't tell you how much fun we had in a place we were not to be--we were told all the time to stay out of the subway. One time my friend Bruce who lived on Charles St. mother seen me fall in the subway from the wall in the back and went to call for help till Bruce told his mother i did not fall--I jumped onto the train. I was in big trouble... she called my mother.
We were friends with the bums and would trade wine for smokes we new them all, and were never afraid of them. That was our play ground and we felt at home in there. Thanks for letting me remember a good time in my life.
Thank you,
Russ H.
