All too often in American city terminals, they lurk below ground, down narrow escalators, walled off and separate, like church and state.
I spent many hours there as a teenager floating up and down the strangely narrow escalators, padding about the thick, orange carpets and finding rare and deleted vinyl in the music library.
The slow ride up the escalator, a narrow pathway bathed in acid-apple-green light, helps acclimate you to the weird, whimsical, all-encompassing atmosphere of Hudson.
Viewers streaming single-file off the narrow bridge from the escalators don't have much time to stop and look before they're pushed along into the collection galleries.
Observers saw two different conditions of the peripheral escalator illusion: one with a narrow background grating (i.e., the width of columns) and one with a wide background grating (i.e., about 2.5 times the width of the columns).
Adding thousands of New Jersey commuters to the same narrow platforms and limited stairs, ramps and escalators (with little or no chance of expansion at these stations), would create unbearable crowding and a safety nightmare.
Escalators are useful as the narrow exit means you can be blocked; a lady accomplice might accidentally drop her bags to seal the exit, then shoppers naturally bump into each other, forming the perfect ruse for bag dipping.
Don't ride a Segway through revolving doors, on escalators or stairs, over gangplanks, on narrow ledges, or anywhere else unsafe.
The next day I went to Penn Station, where the escalators down to the tracks are so narrow that they seem to have been designed before suitcases were invented.
But if you're checking in, you will want to step aboard the escalator that carries you up two floors through a narrow tunnel bathed with yellow-green light.
