BUSES STOP STORIES * USA - Dreams and Desperation on New York's Forsyth Street
... By the end of the year, two or three cut-rate Chinatown-to-Chinatown buses had adopted the strip as their base of operations, stopping there to drop off and collect passengers before lighting out for Washington, Boston and points beyond...
New York,NY,USA - The New York Times, by SAKI KNAFO -June 8, 2008: -- It began in 1998 with a routine act of bureaucracy, a decision by the city’s Department of Transportation to put up a pair of red and white metal signs in the eastern section of Chinatown, on a desolate block in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge. The signs, which bore the cryptic message “Bus Layover Area — 6 a.m.-midnight,” in effect allowed private interstate buses to wait briefly by the curb, seven days a week... 
As the popularity of the buses increased, their numbers multiplied, and by 2002 three companies were wrangling over the little block, Forsyth Street between East Broadway and Division Street. One company owner hired several women to sell tickets on the sidewalk, and his competitors followed suit. Quarrels between rival ticket sellers became commonplace... Each day, hundreds of people descended on the strip. To take advantage of the surge in foot traffic, local business owners eventually began selling Asian snacks like sweet olives and shrimp crackers, along with less exotic items like Pringles for the increasingly prevalent non-Chinese traveler... In just a few years, a vibrant, competitive and largely self-contained economy had materialized around the bus stop, or bah-see zhan, an economy that employed at least 200 people, all of them bound to one another in a complicated network of alliances, dependencies and feuds... The bus stop represented different things to different populations. To some riders, like college students, it was simply a place to begin a cheap journey to Philadelphia, Washington or other points along the Eastern seaboard. To many Chinese immigrants who made up the bah-see zhan economy, the bus stop was something else yet, a bubbling hotpot of ambition, creativity and bickering — New York boiled down to its essential elements...
Last March, in an effort to impose order on the often fractious and sometimes violent scene, officers from the Fifth Precinct, which covers Chinatown, floated the most recent in a string of proposals to banish the buses from the heart of the neighborhood... Yet many on the strip still fear that the bus stop will be dismantled, and if that happens, what the city will have lost is a community that, in the span of a single block, manages to capture the immigrant experience in both its most troubling and its most inspiring aspects... In the meantime, the bus owners and the ticket sellers and the shopkeepers and the building managers continue to struggle, fight, fail, prosper, and strive... (Photos by James Estrin/New York Times - 1 · The dramas that play out on a single block in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge capture the immigrant experience in both its most troubling and its most inspiring aspects - 2 · A vibrant, competitive and largely self-contained economy materialized around the bus stop, or bah-see zhan - 3 · Women work on commission, selling bus tickets) Labels: passengers stories
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