The immortal icon of Subway is Marilyn Monroe with her dress blown out of Exit 6 on the corner of Lexington and East 52nd. An exhibitionist display on the set of “The Straw Widower” (1955) catapulted the actress into the Hollywood pantheon, but it’s not worth repeating. Not only was it the last straw for the star’s second husband, Joe DiMaggio; there was a fight and a week later the star filed for divorce.
Trains kick up dust containing, among other things: mouse droppings, food scraps, grease particles and other impurities. Analysis carried out a year ago on behalf of the Travelmath portal showed that New York’s subways are the dirtiest in the country. Nowhere else have scientists found so many live strains of pathogenic bacteria and other harmful microorganisms.
The attractions that await a New Yorker during rush hour were depicted more realistically than in “The Straw Widower,” for example, in “Crocodile Dundee” (1986). In the grand finale, the main character (Paul Hogan) must climb over the heads of the people packed like sardines on the platform to confess his love to his beloved (Linda Kozlowski). There is probably no film set in Manhattan that does not feature the subway, at least for a moment. Almost everyone on the planet knows it by sight, but only up close do we notice its dirt, tardiness, and archaic technology.
The first trains left on October 27, 1904, and the signaling system is not much older – the wheels press plates that light up lamps in the managers’ cabins, who enter the trains on paper. Even the Polish State Railways operated more efficiently towards the end of the Polish People’s Republic.
Unfortunately, neither the city nor the state have the money to modernize it. The mere fact that the world’s largest urban rail system is operational is a miracle. The tracks are 1,370 kilometers long, 60 percent of which are underground and the rest via viaducts, embankments or concrete trenches parallel to the streets, and run through 472 stations. On weekdays, the subway carries 5.7 million passengers, and on weekends 5.9 million. Admission has increased 55-fold over the century, from 5 cents to $2.75 ($121 for a monthly pass).
The carriages are powered by 650 volts of electricity from the third rail, which produces impressive blue sparks. Sometimes the rubbish catches fire in them. Then the train stops and the conductor utters the sacramental: “We are experiencing fire complications. We apologize for the inconvenience. We will depart shortly.”
This “soon” is, of course, either a complete lie or – as President Trump says – a hyperbolic truth. The stop can last 15 minutes or even an hour. Nervous passengers lose their temper, give unparliamentary monologues, argue with their neighbors and sometimes harass them. They cannot see the conductor because he is hidden in the closet, behind an armored door.
Contrary to urban legend, the subway is actually quite safe. In 28 years, I’ve only been mugged once. I’ve also been mugged once. At the time, I was working as a bartender at a punk bar in the East Village, starting my shift at 10 p.m., and around 9 p.m. I boarded the F train at Avenue N station in Brooklyn. Despite the early hour, the train was empty, but two young men got off at Avenue I.
They showed up, brandished knives, and demanded money. I think I had $10, which threw them off balance. They looked at me appraisingly, and then a taller young man said slowly, “Boots. Take them off.” I used a trick that often helps in these situations, which is to play the role of a poor immigrant. I told the robbers that I was a butcher’s assistant, who worked all night in the meat packing plant, cutting meat, so if they took my shoes I would have to go home, lose my shift and possibly my job.
Their expressions softened a bit as the conductor apologized for the inconvenience and informed us that due to unspecified complications we were heading to the expressway, so we would only stop at Church Avenue. The train sped by and I thought about my miserable fate. They became curious about life in Poland, I began to tell them the story, the robbery turned into a friendly conversation, and the boys got off at Church to rob someone else. Not only did they not take my shoes, they even returned the stolen money.
However, I discovered the theft after a friend of a painter opened the door, when the cleaners woke me up in the middle of the night in Coney Island, where the D, F, N and Q lines end. The thief was so skilled at his job (or at partying so loud) that he got out of my back seat, took my wallet out of my pants pocket and took my watch, but I didn’t wake up!
I experienced less dramatic adventures during a trip organized by subway enthusiast and expert Joseph Raskin. Well, deep beneath the streets of New York City, there are miles of empty tunnels that lead to nowhere. They were created at different periods in the city’s history, reflecting the engineers’ excessive ambition over their sense of reality. Above the Roosevelt Avenue stop in Jackson Heights, you can walk through the entire dead station, which spans three intersections, has platforms and sleepers, but no tracks. As the train roars one floor below, silver filings with the unique and nostalgic smell of the railroad swirl in the shafts of light. The station was built in 1936 and no one has visited it since. It has become a landfill of dilapidated furniture, broken machines of unknown purpose and cheap vodka bottles.
– Before World War II, there were plans that could have made the city bigger, more modern and more beautiful today, but the architects’ ideas were crushed by politicians, says Raskin. On September 22, 1929, the New York Times wrote: “Young people can rest assured that before they reach the prime of their lives the subway will carry them to all points of the metropolis without being exposed to dangerous and indecent crowds.” This is not the first or last mistake of this respected newspaper. Soon came the stock market crash, the Great Depression and the war. Young people grew old in crowds.
When the salutes died down, motorization boomed, so the government invested in highways. The last ambitious subway reconstruction plan was presented in 1968 by Mayor John Lindsay. At a cost of one billion dollars, he wanted to complete the construction of the line that ran under 2nd Avenue, which had been begun in the 1920s. He was prevented from doing so by the budget crisis.
The most spectacular of the abandoned tracks is the 330-foot-long Alfred Ely Beach Underground Railroad, built in 1870, with a station located just below Manhattan City Hall. During its 11 months of operation, 400,000 people paid 25 cents each to travel from Warren Street to Murray Street. Beach wanted to interest the authorities in the idea, but Mayor William “Boss” Tweed, a notorious corrupt politician, decided he wouldn’t make any money and killed the project.
Beneath City Hall is an elegant waiting room with a copy of a Greek sculpture and a fountain. In its heyday, there was also an aquarium with goldfish and a piano. Another strange and interesting place is an exaggerated branch of the R line tracks, which leads to Staten Island, because the fifth borough was planned by pre-war engineers to be connected to the rest of the city by a subway line, not just by ferries.
A New Yorker recognizes a visitor at first sight and tries to avoid him. Not because he is rude (although sometimes that is the case), but because a tourist works at a different pace, disrupts the choreography of pedestrian traffic and slows down the dynamism of the city. He stops and looks around instead of running. He forms a troop with his wife and children, even if they have to walk in single file. He stands proudly at the subway gate when 20 people are already cursing behind him.
Getting around comfortably in New York is a difficult and complicated art, so the locals have developed a number of ways, some of which involve using the train. The journey from Brooklyn to Queens takes as long as it does from Warsaw to Krakow, so we plan our fight for a seat in advance: we have to stand so that the train doors stop right in front of us. How do we determine the location of a strategic bridge? Just look at the yellow lines along the edge of the platform. The doors will be where there are the most black welts left by soles and gum marks.
When we can’t get a seat, we resort to the politically incorrect method of racial and class profiling. We are faced with a passenger whose appearance suggests he will soon get up. Men in suits usually get off at Wall Street or the Jay Street courthouses, Chinese in Chinatown, tourists in Times Square, African-Americans at the stations where the Orange and Blue lines intersect, gays in the West Village, lesbians in Park Slope and Carroll. Gardens, hipsters in Bedford, Orthodox Jews on the Lower East Side and Borough Park, Poles on Smith/9th Street and Church, not to mention Greenpoint Avenue.
Why are New York subways slow, dirty and uncomfortable?
Not all newbies realize how crucial it is to get on the first or last car. Let’s say we have to get off at Times Square. If we board closer to the end of the train going uptown, we’ll end up at 40th Street. If we were at the front, our car would stop near exit 43. During rush hour, the station is packed with crowds of several thousand people, so a seemingly small difference could mean we’re late for work.
In 2003, authorities began installing digital signs warning when the next train would arrive, but they only managed to do so on platforms L and 6. On the others, you have to lean over the tracks and see what color the lights on the platforms are. If something flashes red, it’s not good – a traffic jam has formed.
The penalty for jumping the gate is a $100 fine or 10 days in jail. It is also forbidden to sit on the steps, distribute leaflets, give sermons, roller skate or skateboard, listen to loud music, put your feet on the seat or lie down on it, pass from one carriage to another through the inner door, drink alcohol, smoke, gamble, barter, beg, block entrances… All of these are dead regulations.
If we want to get rid of the musician who whistles above our ears, we will unfortunately have to make a donation to him. In New York, there is a whole caste of Subway artists who accept money not because they have talent, but because they will leave.
At first glance, subway passengers are a gloomy bunch. They don’t look at each other, almost no one talks. However, appearances can be deceiving. A New Yorker won’t pay attention to a guy in a wedding dress with a pot on his head, but one ironic remark from someone, a joke or an opera aria from a conductor bored with a libretto will be enough: “We’re coming to Broadwaaay! A long and bright road!” and the whole carriage bursts into laughter. Friendships and romances are born, money falls into the hats of musicians, dancers, merchants, and scoundrels, and the subway moves on. Or it stops due to complications.
