Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Subway heroes, as they are inevitably tagged before the grease from the tracks is rubbed off, come along every now and then — indeed, as the story of Chad Lindsey suggests, perhaps more often than we know.



Minutes after rescuing a man who had fallen onto the subway tracks in Pennsylvania Station on Monday, Mr. Lindsey, 33, managed to melt back into the anonymity of the city, escaping the notice of the police, paramedics and subway workers.

“I’m of many minds of being in the spotlight,” he said after a call from this reporter, whose short blog post on Monday prompted one of Mr. Lindsey’s friends to identify him on Tuesday.

“But what the hey,” he said.

Mr. Lindsey, 33, is from Harbor Springs, Mich. He moved to New York City three years ago and settled in Woodside, Queens.

He can take it from there:

“I was waiting for the C to go downtown to a reading,” he said from his office on West 30th Street, where he works as a proofreader. “I’m an actor — shocker.”

He said that almost everyone seems to be an aspiring actor nowadays, but in this case, it is a critical point to the story: Mr. Lindsey currently appears in an Off Broadway show called “Kasper Hauser,” in a role that requires him to repeatedly lift a character who cannot walk.

On Monday, he was thinking ahead to his reading. “I’m kind of zoned out, and I saw this guy come too quickly to the edge,” he said. “He stopped and kind of reeled around. I felt bad, because I couldn’t get close enough to grab his coat. He fell, and immediately hit his head on the rail and passed out.”

Mr. Lindsey said he sensed that a train was approaching simply because the platform was crowded. “I dropped my bag and jumped down there,” he said. “I tried to wake him up. He probably had a massive concussion at that point. I jumped down there and he just wouldn’t wake up, and he was bleeding all over the place.”

He looked back up at the people on the platform. “There were lots of people, and none of them looked like they’d be particularly good at jumping down there,” he said. `“I yelled, ‘Contact the station agent and call the police!’ which I think is hilarious because I don’t think I ever said ‘station agent’ before in my life. What am I, on ‘24’?”

The man would not wake up, Mr. Lindsey said: “He was hunched over on his front. I grabbed him from behind, like under the armpits, and kind of got him over to the platform. It wasn’t very elegant. I just hoisted him up so his belly was on the platform. It’s kind of higher than you think it is.”

He stole a glance toward the dark subway tunnel that was becoming ominously less dark, with the glow on the tracks, familiar to all New Yorkers, signaling an approaching train. “I couldn’t see the train coming, but I could see the light on the tracks, and I was like, ‘I’ve got to get out of this hole.’ ”

He remembered the subway hero of 2007, Wesley Autrey, who famously jumped on top of a man having a seizure on the tracks and held him down in the shallow trench between the tracks as the subway passed harmlessly over them. “I thought about the guy who laid on the guy on the tracks? I was like, ‘I am not doing that. We’ve got to get out of here.’ ”

Others on the platform responded. “Someone pulled him out, and I just jumped up out of there,” Mr. Lindsey said. With time to spare: “The train didn’t come for another 10 or 15 seconds or something.” It appears that the motorman did not see the incident, as service was not interrupted.

The man lay bleeding on the platform, and the police arrived. Mr. Lindsey said he gave a brief account to the police before another train arrived. “My adrenaline was pumping,” he said. “I couldn’t tell you why, but I just got on the next train. He was in the hands of the cops.”

After the rescue, a large group from the platform entered the subway car with Mr. Lindsey, smiling and clapping him on the back and saying thank you.

“Then I sort of freaked out, and I was nervous and shaky. These five women opened their purses and gave me Handi Wipes. I was covered in blood and dirt from the subway tracks. One woman was a nurse, and said, ‘Don’t have caffeine or cigarettes for an hour and a half,’ because of the adrenaline in my heart.”

An editor from The New York Times was in the same car, and he gave Mr. Lindsey a business card and asked him to call. He did not call, but he recalled meeting the Times editor and, to confirm it was he, he produced the card on Tuesday and read the number and other identifying information scrawled on the back.

He thought of the fallen man and wondered briefly if he had done the right thing. “I thought maybe I shouldn’t have moved him, but you’re going to get creamed by a train,” he said. He credited his show at the Flea Theater in TriBeCa with keeping him in shape. “I have to lift a kid up all the time, and I’m always complaining about it, but I guess it’s worth it,” he said.

The fallen man was taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital Manhattan and was later released. The police identified him late Tuesday afternoon as Theodore Larson, 60, of the Bronx.

Mr. Lindsey, of course, never learned the man’s name. His story told, he said goodbye, adding, “It was quite a New York day.”



[An updated version of this article was prepared for Wednesday print editions.]

