Q: When I was coming out of the northbound 1/9 train at 66th Street the other day at about 4 p.m., there was a huge backup getting off the platform. Why? Because the authorities had closed off (with an iron gate) all of the turnstiles, except the two full-body ones, which are (as everyone knows) slow anyway. I’ve seen this before at that stop. Why does it happen at all? And especially at a busy stop during the late afternoon?

A: To prevent turnstile jumping, New York City Transit locks the traditional turnstiles – the ones with three horizontal prongs – when there’s no one at the token booth. So either the exit you use at 66th Street recently had its booth closed, or the booth was closed on the day in question.

The high turnstiles (what you call “full-body”) that accept incoming passengers are built with much greater resistance than the normal turnstiles, which is why they’re slower. At many stations, there are exit-only high turnstiles that have no resistance, meaning less delay. There are far fewer 24-hour high turnstiles than traditional turnstiles, so you may have as many people trying to get through two of them as there used to be getting through four traditional turnstiles. It would certainly help the situation if the city could set about adding additional high turnstiles to these stations.

Q: A few days ago I was on the southbound platform of the 72nd Street stop for the 1, 2, 3, and 9 trains. I noticed an ornate metal door at track level roughly where the eighth car of the downtown local train stops. The door looks nothing like the hundreds of utilitarian metal doors that lead to storage rooms and other places throughout the subway system. It has a silver-chrome finish with ornamental bars and other decorative elements. It could have been in a bank lobby. Can you find out why this particular door is so fancy, especially since it is only accessible from the track bed, and what’s behind it?

A: Not only does it have an ornamental door, the lintel above the door is decorated with a floral pattern – and it doesn’t fit in with the mosaic on the walls on the other side of the station. I contacted both New York City Transit and several subway hobbyist sites and the best theory anyone can come up with is that it’s a standard service door for cables and equipment. The 72nd Street Station is part of the original IRT, which means it was constructed in 1904. Its designers wanted it to be beautiful as well as utilitarian, so they often built even service doors with elaborate decoration. The fact that another service door at the north end of the platform has identical metal work gives some weight to this theory. Part of the recent refurbishment and reconstruction of the station included the cleaning of the hundred-year-old decorative patterns, which may explain why you’ve just noticed it.

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