Still No Hotline Support Phone on the RFK/Triborough

For years something has bothered me any time I cross the RFK/Triborough Bridge (née Triborough Bridge) going toward Randall’s Island. Just before the stairs that lead to the raised portion of the walkway stands a sign. It reads “LIFE IS WORTH LIVING”, with a claim that an NYC WELL 24-hour hotline telephone is up ahead. A toll-free number for NYC WELL also appears. This message obviously targets the unknown number of people who come to this bridge intending to jump their death into the Hell Gate.

I don’t know if the old Triborough Bridge ever had any payphones but I can tell you with almost 100% certainty that a suicide prevention telephone hot line never existed up there, contrary to what this sign and its previous iterations promised. An earlier version of the sign made it even clearer that the phone (if it existed) would have been found 150 feet ahead, near the jumping point.

MTA Bridges and Tunnels, the agency that maintains the bridge, knew about this situation, or at least somebody there did, because I told them about it seven years ago. I sent an email asking where, on the bridge, could I find the hotline telephone mentioned on the sign? I looked in any reasonable location and found no trace of a phone.

The MTA replied by telling me I was wrong, and that emergency phones existed on all the spans of that bridge. I don’t know what kind of selective blindness I might possess, but either no phone exists on that span or else the MTA went out of its way to keep it extremely well-hidden. The latter possibility, however unlikely, is the only reason I maintain some hope that a crisis hotline phone truly does exist on that bridge.

I would like to see the promised 24-hour hotline phone placed on that bridge. Phones of some sort are found on the other bridges I cross over in New York, including the Queensboro, Manhattan, Williamsburg, and Brooklyn bridges. This span of the RFK appears to lack any emergency phone equipment whatsoever, for neither pedestrians nor motorists alike.

In response to my inquiry it seems obvious that no one at the MTA went so far as to visit the bridge and make a physical verification of their claim that this phone exists. Instead they relied on the authority of something like a spreadsheet or database entry. I could have labored the point but the bureaucracy seemed impenetrable.

A previous version of the sign disappeared at some point last year. I don’t know how long it was gone but I hopefully interpreted its absence to mean that somebody at the MTA got the memo: No phone actually existed here so someone should either put in a phone or remove the sign.

Nothing doing. I think the sign’s temporary absence might have had something to do with changing the toll-free phone number from another crisis prevention service to NYC WELL.

It seems like a cruel joke to put this up here and assume nobody will notice that no phone exists. I think this sign, with its hollow promise, actually exploits the suicidal, who will pay no attention to it anyway, while the MTA earns brownie points from observers for the appearance of making the resource available.