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Saturday, December 19, 2009 -- Beneath New York run roughly 1200 miles of train track – enough to connect San Francisco to Chicago – which weave a web entangling Brooklyn, Queens, Long Island, and the Bronx with the island of Manhattan in the center, its nether regions swiss-cheesed with subway tunnels. Anyone with two dollars and a quarter can get from one corner of the city to the other, trips that run anywhere from three minutes (times square to 34th street?) to three hours (Yonkers to Coney Island?).
In peak hours, when traffic locks up the bridges and when parking lots charge fifty dollars or more per day, when cab rides from borough to borough run twenty dollars for a short trip, the subway cars fill with passengers, shoulder to shoulder, coat to coat in wintertime.
Janitors and bankers alike, CEOs, prostitutes, cops, construction workers, pickpockets, gang bangers, the homeless and law school students – everyone descends the filthy, black dust covered stairs, walking through the turnstiles into the mass transit stations.
The stations are filthy. At best they reek of bleach. Even recently mopped the tiles are soot stained, black pieces of old gum – like ancient rubber – remain forever on the floor. Watch the tracks from a quiet, uncrowded platform and you’ll see rats, scurrying across the dust between the tracks, rummaging through the occasional pieces of trash – the soda cup, the empty bags of chips, sandwich and candy wrappers.
The subways are a main vein, running people through the city like blood through the heart, a constant stream of people being zipped from home to work, from business to pleasure, from the social scenes of nightclubs and bars to the solitude of homes and apartment bedrooms.
You can avoid the subways. Yes, if you have the money you can. Afford twenty dollars each way into work, ten dollars between bars, thirty dollars to a friends Brooklyn brownstone for a party… the subways are avoidable, if you can afford it.
For most, the subways are the equalizers. They connect home environments with work environments. They connect businesses to their employees, stores to their customers, one neighborhood to another. Take away a subway line, you might as well be erasing a region from the map. Suddenly the area is inaccessible.
This week, New York’s Mass Transit Authority (MTA) announced its plans to clost the W and the G lines.