lesson - subways of new york

Tone & Sense Information November 19, 2018

The Globe & Mail Michele Landsberg

Well before Bernie Goetz became a dubious national hero by shooting four black youths on the IRT at Christmas in 1984, the New York subway had become a hellish metaphor.

While the subways of Moscow, Montreal, London, Paris and Toronto are celebrated as distinctive symbols of urban living, the New York subway strikes fear into the hearts of everyone who doesn’t live here, and even most of those who do.

(A survey in the Bronx last year revealed that 23 per cent of adults and 33 per cent of youths carry weapons when they go underground, knives being the side arm of choice).

As a fairly regular rider of the Terror of the Deep, also known as The Beast by some transit cops, I have to say it’s not nearly as bad as it’s cracked up to be. True, it has a staggering crime rate, by Canadian standards—11 homicides, 28 rapes and 13,000 felonies last year—but all things are relative. There were, after all, 2000 murders above ground in 1985.

Like everything else in New York, the sheer scale of the thing is overwhelming: its size, speed, filth, even its corruption—one tunnel, still not open, has been under construction for 18 years. Three and a half million fares a day are deposited in turn-stiles at 463 stations (and 188,000) more farebeaters jump over

turnstiles or enter through exit gates); 6000 individually powered cars rattle along 1106 kilometres of track at a top speed of 64 km/h. Despite the fact that many of the cars are 30 years old and much of the equipment almost farcically outdated, close to 87 per cent of the trains arrive and depart on time.

The subway’s terrible reputation is partly a subjective response to frightening surroundings. Nobody knows that better than I; on a visit two years ago, I took the subway for the first time to get back from

ENGLISH 10 Media Studies �1

SUBWAYS OF NEW YORK


the Brooklyn Museum. Flinching down a urine-soaked stairway to the murky depths, I asked directions from a stranger just as the train roared in.

“Don’t get on the last ca-a-ar!” he screamed after me as I sprinted away. (The parlour car, as it’s known, is the mobile headquarters for drug dealers.) I rode all the way back to Manhattan in the heroic mood of one who has overcome great peril.

But the crime rate underground is in fact steadily dropping, partly because of the 4000 transit police… at least one on every train after 8 p.m. “Of course,” conceded transit spokesman Bob Slovak, “an armed robbery in a train is a lot scarier, because there’s nowhere to flee.”

That thought does occur to me now and then as I goggle along i the stench, crowds, and graffiti grottiness. It’s hard not to feel menaced in a car that resembles a moving coal bin, where the few working lights flicker wanly and every possible surface (including emergency exit instructions) is a black smear of illiterate spray-painted scrawl.

The stations themselves now have brightly lit “off-hours waiting areas” in sight of the ticket booth, where late travellers grimly bunch together. Around them stretch Piranesi vistas of vaulted gloom. Water drips from rusted overhead pipes to collect in rancid puddles on the stairways and between the tracks, scummed over with disintegrating candy wrappers and coffee cups. You imagine, though

you rarely see, the rats.

The mad and the desperate are more visible. Beggars hiss at you on the stairways; sleepers bundled by the walls have the pallor of death, as though they haven’t surfaced to the light in years. On the Grand Central shuttle the other day, passengers practiced stony avoidance as a trance-


The Pizza Rat of New York Subway

It can be argued that there are fewer things more New York than a slice, the subway and a rat. Combine the three, and it's magic.

Behold Pizza Rat, the world's newest viral star and, for some, a symbol of the ultimate New Yorker.

A YouTube video was uploaded of a rat attempting to carry a slice of pizza down some subway stairs in the Big Apple.

No matter that the slice is way bigger than Pizza Rat and at any minute the rodent could be squashed by scampering humans who are also just trying to get to their destination. Pizza Rat was on a mission.

"He appears poised to complete the descent and return to his squalid rat hole with his unnecessarily large prize -- an inspiring demonstration of the grit and determination one needs to make it in New York City,”

Lisa Respers France -CNN


eyed man whose denim jacket announced “Con-Chon-Thon for Lord Jesus, Master Dragon” treated us to a wheezing religious rap.

It wasn’t always like this. In 1912, workers excavating for the new BMT were astonished to dig up the forgotten remains of the Beach Pneumatic Subway, the 1870 creation of Alfred Ely Beach. Any of us might have been amazed: that very first New York subway had a luxurious plush-seated car that ran a total of 93 metres under Broadway, propelled from behind by a huge fan. The carpeted—carpeted!—station was complete with paintings, a fountain, a grand piano and Grecian statues holding up elegant glove lamps.

The current subway opened in 1904; its first full day of operation earned the headline Rush Hour Blockade. Rush hour is still traumatic. The police have 37 German shepherds (They’re not dogs, they’re

wolves,” leered Mayor Edward Koch) who , despite their limitations—they can’t pursue thieves up escalators—have an impressive arrest record being trained to “bite and hold… rather than devour a person’s flesh” according to a reassuring officer. But rush hour is still peak crime time.

I admit that it sounds and frequently smells, awful. In summer, the heat, especially in stalled cars in unbearable. The aging tracks are probably the world’s noisiest. Still, improvements (rather like the work of Sisyphus) are ongoing. I have actually ridden on a gleaming new graffiti-free silver express to Brooklyn which a mellifluous conductor coaxingly announced over a clear PA system, “Your local is waiting across the platform; set lively now to make your connection.” The connection turned out to be a

sinister, filthy shuttle in which restless teen-agers passed ceaselessly from car to car, looking for ways marks.

Is this an indictment of the New York Subway? No. Crisscrossing the city underground, I am always awed by the speed and convenience with which it transports its human freight, and I never fail to imagine the snarling, gridlocked traffic somewhere over my head. Part of New York’s greatness is due to its density and diversity, and it simply could not exist without the subway; perhaps no city can be great without a subway.

Screeching, grinding, rattling and roaring through the years, it still speaks hauntingly of that motto cared in stone at the City Hall station, a testament to the cooperative urban spirit: Non knobs anti solum—born not for ourselves along.



Writing Prompt: Terrifying and Terrific Tribulations of Transit!

Reflect on an experience you have had on public transport, or an interesting experience while travelling in another city or country. The writing should contain at least two paragraphs that are in different quadrants of the tone-plot diagram.


lesson - subways of new york

Documents