By PATRICK O'GILFOIL HEALY
ROCHESTER, NY, Aug. 7 - In better days, this sagging manufacturing city had a subway. That, of course, means it had a subway tunnel.
But the subway, which opened in 1927, hasn't carried any passengers since 1956. And the tunnel has become a pipeline of gloom running beneath downtown, 1.7 miles of rusted track littered with burned-out ticket stations and the detritus of graffiti writers and homeless people. To city officials, the old tunnel is a monument to decay, a big pothole just begging to be filled.
Fed up with what they call a chronic liability and a headache, city administrators want to pack the tunnel with tons of dirt and seal it up. The state and federal governments would pay 95 percent of the estimated $21 million cost. City administrators say it is a simple, cheap and permanent fix.
But the plan has enraged some residents and preservationists. They have started a campaign to stop the fill and force the City Council to consider preserving the tunnel and turning it into a museum, art gallery or a light-rail line.
The subway tunnel, which runs east and west beneath Broad Street, lies on the original bed of the Erie Canal, and some residents even advocate flooding the channel and bringing the canal back to the heart of the city.
"We were the smallest city in the country to have a subway," said Sandee Lyman, one of a few dozen residents who wear neon "Chill the Fill" T-shirts around town. "It's beautiful and it's historic. So why fill it in with dirt?"
The tunnel's supporters began circulating petitions and attending City Council meetings this spring. They started talking about how cities like Creede, Colo., and Hutchison, Kan., were converting their old mine shafts into museums. They organized flashlight tours through the Rochester subway until the city found out and put up "no trespassing" signs.
Supporters said refurbishing the tunnel could draw tourists, money and prestige to a city desperate for all three.
Rochester, a city of 219,773 people on Lake Ontario, has had the highest homicide rate in the state the last 7 of 10 years. Its struggling economy has improved after a sharp downturn during the last recession, but the city's major employer, Eastman Kodak, announced last month that it was planning to cut as many as 10,000 jobs worldwide. That's in addition to the 15,000 job cuts that were announced a year and a half ago, including 4,500 in Rochester.
The city spends an average of $1.2 million a year to shore up the crumbling subway tunnel, reinforcing corroding supports, columns and steel beams. It sends in the police to investigate reports of trespassing, fights or drug deals. On the street level, crews patch up cracking, sagging sections of road over the tunnel.
With Rochester projecting a $28 million budget gap for next year, Ed Doherty, the director of environmental preservation, said the city simply could not afford the niggling, piecemeal repair costs.
Mr. Doherty said the city would pay $1 million to fill the tunnel and collect the rest from government bridge-repair funds.
"We've got to do something," Mr. Doherty said. "We've got to repair it or eliminate it."
To plug the tunnel, crews would shore up the columns and repair any buckling beams or weak supports, then bulldoze in tons and tons of dirt, working in sections. After that, workers would drill holes through Broad Street and pump in enough dirt to pack the 20-foot-high tunnel completely.
Though the tunnel has lain fallow for a half-century, several residents said they were opposing the fill because it would be irrevocable. Packing it with dirt, they said, would destroy a landmark that ties the city to its roots.
After the Erie Canal was rerouted south of downtown in 1919, Rochester covered the canal bed with Broad Street and laid train tracks along the dry canal bed, anticipating population growth that never came. The subway made about a dozen stops, and it linked trolley lines and passenger trains that connected the city to the rest of the state.
Ridership, which peaked during the Depression, fell sharply during the economic boom after World War II, when more people bought cars and the city grew in directions not served by the subway. In 1956, the city shut it down.
"My one and only time to ride the subway was on its last day," said John Curran, a supporter of preserving the tunnel. He could clearly remember the car he rode in. "It was red, my favorite color. I was 8."
Since then, all but one of the subway cars have been scrapped, and the lamps, staircases, stations and columns in the tunnel have wasted away. The tunnels are now havens for about a dozen homeless people. Graffiti writers come down to paint, and teenagers descend to party. Art classes and photographers often visit.
One recent Sunday afternoon, the smells of rot, garbage and smoke permeated the tunnel from end to end. One graffiti tag declared, "Jesus Christ is Lord." Another said, "You will die."
Old shoes, jeans and bottles lay everywhere, and charred logs indicated someone had made a fire recently. The only person in sight, a man in a blue T-shirt, scurried from the tunnel and up an embankment when he saw a group of visitors approaching.
On the eastern side of downtown, the subway line emerges from the gloom and becomes an viaduct straddling the Genesee River. This is the most revered portion of the subway line, and city and state officials have secured $3 million in federal money to refurbish the viaduct and make it more accessible to pedestrians.
Mr. Doherty said that section of the line would not be touched.
The tunnel's fate remains an open question, but Tim Mains, a city councilman, said the subway's supporters seem to have won their first fight. Mr. Doherty had said he wanted to start plugging the tube by early this fall, but politics seem to make that less likely.
The mayor's office and three Council seats are opening up in the fall, and Mr. Mains, one of five mayoral candidates, said the Council would most likely put off any decision on the tunnel until after the election.
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