Emily Singleton
NIGHTMARE: Emergency workers (inset) remove the body of theater student Emily Singleton (right) from the tracks at the Canal Street station Sunday. (
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The young woman who tumbled onto subway tracks and died in lower Manhattan over the weekend has been identified as a 22-year-old theater student who came from Pennsylvania with dreams of making it on Broadway.
Emily Singleton — a minister’s daughter who had just graduated from Bucknell University — “was finally doing what she really wanted to do in life,’’ her grieving grandmother, Janet Singleton, 85, told The Post last night.
“New York was her dream,’’ said the grandma of the “beautiful’’ budding actress from Downington, Pa.
“She just thought it was the most wonderful place to live.
“I talk to her every Thursday, and she was telling me . . . she was enjoying herself going to plays and different activities in the city.
“She realized the beginning of her dream. Now, she’ll do it in heaven, I guess.”
The Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theater executive director Pamela Moller Kareman called Singleton “vibrant and talented.”
Singleton enrolled at the school in September 2012 after completing a summer program there in 2009.
“She was a beautiful young woman in all ways someone could be beautiful…we loved her. t’s a terrible tragedy.
“She was a very important part of our community — we’re all deeply saddened by this.”
A straphanger spotted Singleton’s body on the tracks in the Canal Street station Sunday afternoon.
Singleton — who lived in a well-kept brownstone on Berkeley Place near Seventh Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn — was found dead covered in soot and lying in a trough between the tracks.
Police believe that she had been bar-hopping earlier in the night and got drunk and stumbled off the platform, fatally hitting her head, sources said.
She was dressed in stylish high-heel boots and black leather pants at the time.
“Let me hope she didn’t suffer,’’ Janet Singleton said, adding that Emily’s social-worker mother is “not [doing] great’’ and her dad, Janet’s son, was “taking it as you would expect.”
Emily did not return home for Easter, her grandmother said, deciding instead to work at her job at a city dress shop to pay for acting classes.
“She decided to stay and work for the weekend, and I regret that,’’ Janet Singleton said.
The grandmother said Emily “had a few boyfriends on a string.
“She was a beautiful girl, with beautiful, long brown hair and big brown eyes,’’ she said.
“It’s horrible, horrible, horrible.
“She was the most outgoing, beautiful girl. She was so talented, she sang, she danced.
“She had the lead in her high-school play, ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ ” the grandmother said proudly.
“She was fulfilling her dream, but hadn’t quite made it yet.”