Busy UES Subway Escalator Broken For Months, Angering Residents

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — A heavily-used escalator at an Upper East Side subway station has sat broken for months, angering residents and a neighborhood lawmaker who say the disrepair is causing bottlenecks and posing a nuisance for disabled commuters.

Since February, an escalator at the 72nd Street-Second Avenue Q train station has been out of service, and the MTA has blown past at least three self-imposed deadlines to fix it, according to City Councilmember Julie Menin.

Besides this escalator, which serves the entrance at East 69th Street, the 72nd Street station has two other escalators which have been working normally. Still, two functioning escalators may not be enough for the busy station, which ranked among the top 10 percent of citywide stations in 2020, serving about 12,500 daily riders. (Pre-pandemic, that figure topped 30,000).

Meanwhile, as the escalator has sat unused, passersby have begun tossing their garbage onto it, creating a visual eyesore.

"People have taken to throwing their TRASH onto the frozen, unused escalator steps. This is an unacceptable condition," one constituent wrote to Menin's office in March.

"Riders and community citizens have a right to expect maintenance/repairs within a reasonable amount of time…a week, or two at the most."

Reached for comment, an MTA spokesperson chalked up the delays to supply-chain issues, which have caused necessary parts and materials to be unavailable. The escalator went out of service after an inspection found it was in need of repairs, the spokesperson added.

"Accessibility within the transit system is a top priority at the MTA and ensuring that escalators are operating in a safe manner is an essential part of that mission," agency spokesperson Meghan Keegan said.

Menin, in a letter sent Saturday to MTA CEO Janno Lieber, said her office first contacted the agency in March, and was told that the escalator would be repaired by March 31.

After that deadline came and went, Menin's staff visited the station on April 6, and found two different signs at the top and bottom of the staircase listing different fix dates of April 5 and May 1 — including one "written in sloppy pen," Menin wrote in the letter.

The May 1 deadline, too, has now elapsed — but the MTA told Patch that the escalator is now targeted to go back in service by May 8.

That can't come soon enough, according to Menin, who says each day's rush hour now features a "severe backlog" at the station's mezzanine level.

The disrepair is especially galling given that the station is only about five years old, Menin notes. Still, the problems are nothing new: a 2019 report by the MTA's inspector general found that only three of the 32 escalators at the Second Avenue Subway's new Upper East Side stations met the agency's standards for proper service, with the rest plagued by frequent breakdowns.