The following article is from The New York Times of April 10, 2009. Click on the link for a couple of pictures.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/11/nyregion/11metjournal.html?_r=1
Secaucus Journal
For Circus Workers, Home Is Where the Train Is
By ANNE BARNARD
SECAUCUS, N.J. — Jonathon and Karlene Griggs’s cozy apartment has an eat-in kitchen, mesmerizing views, two flat-screen televisions and room for their son, Bryce, 5, to ride his skateboard up and down the hall.
Leah Christiana Gonzalez’s place is more modest, with a cubiclelike bedroom, no living room and a shower she shares with seven roommates who keep odd hours. Still, not bad for a 26-year-old’s first apartment away from home.
What the two apartments have in common is an extremely exclusive address: on board the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus train.
“We’re basically a city without a ZIP code,” Mr. Griggs, a circus manager, said Thursday at his home, which sat in a railyard in Secaucus, N.J, the sun gleaming off its silver paint. The train’s 33 coach cars, he said, are like a 33-story apartment building, only horizontal, with onboard electricians and mechanics in place of a super.
About 250 people — performers, train crew members, porters, cooks, stagehands — live year round on the train, one of two that crisscross the country carrying elephants, sequined costumes, stage equipment and the cast and crew of the Greatest Show on Earth.
Most train denizens, like Ms. Gonzalez, a gymnast and former Oakland Raiders cheerleader who rides an elephant in the show, live in rooms not much bigger than standard sleeping compartments, eight to a car. But the Griggses’ dwelling, which takes up half a coach, is larger than some New York City apartments.
With a dinette, beige kitchen cabinets, a full-size refrigerator covered with family photos and a bathroom sink where Bryce keeps his Spider-Man toothbrush, it looks like it could be anywhere in Middle America. And it has been.
In a nation where long-distance train travel has almost died out, the Griggses and their neighbors get to see places that cross-country drivers never glimpse: remnants of wooden water channels built by gold rush prospectors in California hills; tracks that run along Washington State beaches where sea lions lounge; mountain passes through the Rockies with no highway signs to clutter the view.
When the train stops, spending about a week at most destinations, its residents can take a circus bus to town to explore and do errands; a few have cars and motorcycles that are hauled on the train’s flatbed freight cars. Between shows at Madison Square Garden this week, the Griggses have been to the Central Park Zoo and the Times Square Toys “R” Us.
In Secaucus, home is a gravel-lined track bed just off the New Jersey Turnpike, hidden away down a dirt road behind a stand of yellow reeds and a warehouse parking lot full of Goya food delivery trucks. Two strings of coach cars, with the name of the circus painted on their sides, stood with their doors open to the spring morning, wooden footstools placed beneath each car’s stepladder. As Bryce snapped together a jigsaw puzzle of jungle animals, a train whistle hooted in the distance.
“I don’t want to use the word ‘stigma,’ ” Mr. Griggs said. “But people think, ‘Circus people, they’re gypsies.’ We’re normal people with normal lives.”
“We’re not carnies,” he added, pronouncing the word with a distaste bound to rile fans of Coney Island’s freak shows. “This is a business.”
Still, a few romantically nomadic touches evoke a time when the line between traveling entertainers and hobos was fuzzier. A charcoal grill on the tracks hinted at a barbecue under the stars the night before. A few nights earlier, some acrobats had a cooking fire that ignited the brush, forcing the appearance of local firefighters. Kodak, a 6-year-old Labrador mix that lives with Mike Hickey, the trainmaster, in an apartment with an electric fireplace, trotted up and down the train, then headed to its dinerlike restaurant, the Pie Car, where the cooks give her bacon.
Alex Ramon Gonzalez, 23 — Ms. Gonzalez’s brother and the illusionist star of the circus’s current Zing Zang Zoom show — said life on the train was far more civilized than hopping from hotel to hotel. No packing and unpacking, and he can keep some of his doves in his apartment.
“The train kind of rocks you to sleep,” his sister said.
Most of the performers, who come from 18 countries, are between 18 and 26. But some are older, with their own families, including 15 children, who have their own teacher and day care on board.
The Lopez family of trapeze artists — two brothers and their wives — between them have five children, whose grandmother rides along to watch them. The Rodriguez family, who perform on steel contraptions that resemble huge hamster wheels, include an 11-year-old acrobat.
Ms. Griggs, once a trapeze artist herself, now freelances as a massage therapist for the performers. Like many of them, she grew up in circuses, where her grandfather walked a tightrope above pacing lions. She met her husband when he joined her and her brother’s trapeze troupe, the Flying Rodleighs.
Mr. Griggs, who has the brush cut and triangular torso of a cartoon muscleman, went into management after he caught his brother-in-law midair at a performance in Germany and felt his kneecap pop out. Still, the couple’s walls are lined with photographs of their old life: husband and wife in sparkling leotards.
Mr. Griggs has a GPS unit mounted in a window so he can learn the names of the places he sees outside. Sometimes, the family takes folding chairs out through their screen door onto the vestibule between cars — which, unlike those on Amtrak, can be opened to the air — to watch the scenery. Sometimes people wave.
“This is really part of American history,” Mr. Griggs said. “It’s one of the last trains where you can lean out and feel the fresh air go by.”