The Subway and the City

Irma Watkins-Owens

No other city in the world is as closely identified with its subway as New York City, and no other public space figures so prominently in the daily lives of its residents. Some writers have characterized the New York subway as a metaphor for the city itself. Like the city that never sleeps, New York’s subway operates 24 hours a day on 842 miles of track, which if linked end on end would reach from Manhattan to Chicago. Nearly three million city dwellers and commuters spend $9 million each day to ride on trains (and buses) making the transit system the center of a small financial empire. The Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) employs 643 workers to handle transit revenue alone. Indeed New York City as we know it could not exist without inexpensive public transit—a nickel a ride in 1904 when the system opened, two dollars today. New York’s rapid transit, the largest in the world, connects the city’s powerful center, Manhattan, to the outer boroughs and the metropolitan area. For many New Yorkers and for the city’s millions of visitors, the subway is the most efficient, cheapest, and fastest way to travel.

Rapid transit in New York also reflects the boom, bust, recession, and renewal in the city’s history. A crisis of most recent memory occurred in the 1970s when the city’s financial problems took their toll on the transit system. While trains had run on time 90 percent of the time in 1940 when today’s tunnels and tracks were virtually complete, in the 1970s the system was nearly half as efficient, and car breakdowns occurred as often as every 9,000 miles. The decline in the system’s reliability along with a rise in unemployment mirrored a general crisis in the post industrial city affecting infrastructure as well as working families and especially neighborhoods of color. Deterioration in one of the city’s most public social spaces, the subway, was a related outcome. Unfortunately an image of the subway of this period still lingers in national memory. However, the city of New York survived its fiscal crisis (with notoriously little help from the federal government) and by 1980 began its present renewal, which is also reflected in a subway renaissance. Track improvement, fleet replacement, and station renovation has transformed the appearance of New York’s subways in the last two decades. The transit authority quadrupled its cleaning staff and launched a controversial war against young graffiti artists or writers who used the subway car as their canvas. Although officials announced the system “graffiti free” in 1989, this change was also part of a larger “quality of life” campaign in the city that enabled massive gentrification, the emergence of enterprise zones, and other displacements yet to be confronted in the present era’s ongoing renewal.

After 9/11 the subway has undergone other changes characterized by the “If you see something say something” announcements, a visible and undercover police presence, and periodic security checkpoints where knapsacks and packages may be subject to search. New Yorkers take such changes in stride, hoping for the least amount of disruption in their travel.

Whatever the ups and downs are in the subway’s history, taking the train to your destination remains the quintessential New York experience. The subway is first and foremost a cultural space and one of the most diverse shared spaces anywhere. Equipped with a Metrocard, a subway map, and an adventurous spirit, one can learn a lot about the city in the course of one’s travels. First, the subway has its own iconography. Many stations on the IRT line (1, 2, and 3 trains) are embellished with a landmark of the neighborhood: at Columbus Circle (59th Street), one of the explorer’s ships, at 116th Street, the seal of Columbia University. The MTA has recently restored many of the century-old originals.

As part of its Capitol Program to rehabilitate subway stations (and control unauthorized artists), the MTA has also commissioned permanent works by established and emerging artists in the materials of the system: mosaic, ceramic, tile, bronze, steel, and faceted glass. Some of these works, such as the Times Square Mural by Roy Lichtenstein, are quite spectacular. The Alice and Wonderland-inspired mosaics at 50th Street on the 1 and 9 line add a whimsical touch to the underground cityscape.

In addition, the subway provides an exciting array of sights as well as sounds; most city travelers have stopped to listen to or watch entertainers, which range from classical instrumentalists and chamber singers to jazz ensembles, be-bop groups, and break dancers. The MTA has authorized some of these performers who audition in its Arts for Transit Program (<http://www.mta.info/mta/aft>). Many others simply set up in heavily traveled spaces and perform for passersby. On any given day, one can enjoy a number of small concerts on the platforms of the New York City subway system.

For a dose of subway history, many city dwellers, visitors, and especially train buffs include the Transit Museum on their travel list. (<http://www.mta.info/mta/museum/index.html>). The museum is located in a decommissioned but still operational subway station at the corner of Boerum Place and Schermerhorn Street, Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn. (The Transit Museum also operates a gallery annex in Grand Central Station, just off the main concourse, which mounts rotating exhibitions.) Visitors experience a uniquely New York brand of time-travel as they board more than nineteen examples of vintage trains that include the classic 1904 wooden cars and the subway car design that set the standard in 1914. The museum also houses over 250,000 archival materials tracing the history of public transportation in New York and the region. The current exhibitions include Steel, Stone and Backbone about the building of the subways, and notably until March 30, 2008, The Art of Marvin Franklin. Franklin, a track worker who died accidentally while working the night shift in April 2007, left a large body of work, much of it never exhibited before. On view is a compelling selection of his sketches, prints and water colors, all set in the subway where the artist spent much of his time. Franklin depicts his subjects, many of whom were homeless, with remarkable detail. The artist, who overcame homelessness himself, skillfully used the insight of his personal experience.

As Franklin’s art demonstrates, a close observer can perceive both the social distance and proximity between New Yorkers in the subway car. Every subway line passes through a broad spectrum of communities identified by ethnicity, class, or race. As author Kate Simon put it, the subway vehicles are probably New York’s only “melting pot.” Thus the subway is its own kind of neighborhood with a unique culture and daily rituals of its own. I began one of these rituals the other day when I boarded the Q train at Prospect Park in central Brooklyn for my regular ride to my campus in midtown Manhattan. I easily found a seat for that time of day (around 11:00 a.m) and pulled out my reading material for the thirty-five to forty-minute trip. The car looked the same as usual, filled with reading, iPod-toting, or half nodding Brooklynites. In other words, most of the subway riders had performed the customary withdrawal into their own worlds, except for a small group of European tourists engaged in animated conversation and studying a subway map. Eventually one in the group came over and asked the passenger seated next to me if they were on the right train for the World Trade Center Memorial site. Because he had not understood the question, the passenger (who had never acknowledged my presence before), looked at me, hoping I had understood. “Oh, the World Trade Center site?” I inquired. “You need to change at Dekalb to the N or the R,” I said. “That’s Dekalb Avenue,” a second passenger clarified. “And you need to get off at Whitehall Street” a third passenger added. By now all of the seasoned strap-hangers in my general vicinity had stopped what they were doing to make sure the directions being given were sufficiently fine tuned. “All you need to do is walk across the platform,” the second passenger said as the trained pulled into the Dekalb Avenue station. “The Q, N, and R are on the yellow line of your map,” the third passenger explained. The tourists gave a chorus of thank-yous as they crossed the platform to wait for their train, having begun their first journey through New York’s vast underground neighborhood.