There are 722 miles of track in the New York subway, according to the title of Clifton Hood’s 722 Miles: The Building of the Subways and How They Transformed New York. Since the book’s 1993 publication, the construction of the 7 train extension into Hudson Yards and the opening of the Second Avenue Line have nudged the number up a little, but the system is so incomprehensibly vast and so deeply ingrained in the psyche of its users and in the anatomy of the city it serves that it transcends the dumbly quantitative. “The symbol of New York might be the skyscraper,” Hood writes, “yet, without the subway, the skyscraper would be an empty shell.”
I came across Hood’s book at a Little Library box just off 7th Avenue while out for a Tuesday afternoon walk in a wintery Park Slope. Prior to some Wuhanian accident we’ll never know the details of, I spent every Tuesday in a lively magazine office in Manhattan’s Flatiron district, sandwiched between a blotted-out sky and crowded sidewalks. Below me clamored the N, Q, and R trains, as connective and invisible as a spinal cord. Merely being out on a solitary Tuesday wander in Brooklyn, rather than in a midtown office building, was proof that my relationship with the city’s nervous system had changed. Pre-COVID-19, before the skyscrapers became empty shells and before so many of my friends and acquaintances left for saner and cheaper parts of the world, I thought of the Morgan Avenue L station as an extension of my living room. I inhabited a world where the day’s major events were always bracketed by 20 to 40 minutes beneath the earth, alone within an unending night-world of strangers. At least my sense of the subway as a vestige of some past existence isn’t unique to me, or even all that new. “Now, its glory days all but forgotten, the subway belongs to New York’s past rather than its future,” wrote Hood in the final line of his book.
But that’s not quite right in 2022. Hood was bothered by what he called “the revolt against politics” and the creation in the 1950s of a transit authority that replaced direct municipal control of the subways and ran the system like a business instead of a public good. Today, the subway belongs to a very specific kind of future, which I once thought of as fictional. It is now an intimation of dystopia, a warning of what could be and what already is. Atomization and anomie beam from every ad and public service announcement.
Spiritually and aesthetically, the subway is now a place where corporations and governments say creepy things to captive groups of people. The ads on the subway have steadily become likely to be PSAs, which are themselves a deranging reminder that I live in a world built by someone with no connection to the actual consequences of his ideology. One ubiquitous piece of rolling propaganda: a cartoonish suite of public service announcements where these awful emoji people gently demand you put your masks on, through appeal to shame and social sanction rather than to reason or science. “Masks speak louder than words,” reads the text on the covered face of one of these eerily nonhuman signifiers. “Bad,” says one notice, below which two of the bubble-people are shown conversing with one another, unmasked. In “better,” they’re talking, but through a reassuringly face-erasing barrier. “Best,” though, is just to sit in silence, reading or gazing at your phone, not looking at or speaking to anyone. Using your voice to talk to another human being, the Authority wants you to know, is not how you minimize the spread of aerosolized droplets of disease that you are a vector of. “Don’t be that person,” another sign warns, four masked heads shooting glares of stern judgment at their naked-faced fellow passenger. On the subway, these Metropolitan Transit Authority-produced ads proclaim, you are to be a faceless nonperson who simply shuts up.
There are other instructive government or nonprofit-sponsored glimpses into the value system of our rulers. “Fight climate change — no driving required,” says one MTA self-plug, as if sustainability is a practical concern for the working-class people who depend on public transit and who mostly do not have the option of driving anywhere. “Health care is cultural preservation … connect with your Roots and your Native Health,” reads an ad for the New York Indian Council’s health program. The notice reflects a somewhat biologically deterministic view of culture, though the attention-clincher is a sterilely crisp-lined and numbingly colorful illustration of a woman in a traditional wrap, her face hidden behind a surgical mask. Even the liberal social-realistic depictions of anonymous members of vulnerable sub-demographics must be masked down here.
Luckily Donna Sue, a social worker and star of a #CombatAgeism-themed poster from the New York Department of the Aging, appears with her face bravely exposed to the world, though her description as an “LGBTQ Advocate, Air Force Veteran, Buddhist” would seem to link her worth as a human being to a set of agreeably diverse beliefs and accomplishments. What about retired old schlubs, drains on society wracked with untrendy private prejudices and stodgy old beliefs about, say, the divinity of Christ? But of course, the effect of the ad isn’t to combat ageism: It’s to enforce the idea that prejudice against certain groups of people is so bad that it must be fought within ourselves, even here, on the downtown R train. And it’s to remind you that your city government suspects you might be guilty of the very sin its messages are trying to correct.
Still, the inducement of existential dread is yet another thing the private sector does better than the government. An especially abundant subway ad depicts a man in his late 30s cradling a young child — both are smiling and happy; it is an image of heaven on Earth. “Everyone will leave a Legacy,” says the ad, which is for a company called Legacy. “What’s yours? Test, improve, and preserve your fertility from home.” How many disasters does this tiny poster contain, not just for the New Yorkers who blew their best reproductive years on dead-end philosophies, drug binges, and late nights at the Mirage, but for a society that has created such profound regret on such a massive and easily monetizable scale? The second-most chilling ad on the typical New York subway car is hard to name, with so many contenders. It may be for time-wasting internet games or crypto scams or venture capital-glutted delivery services or something called the Museum of Sex. It’s best not to think about what the CGI goat in a biplane selling “upx” tokens is actually hawking, though whether through video game hypnosis or the promise of a digital payday, it all comes out as a meaningless waste of attention and time.
The subway remains a manifestation of the ruling value system, in the sense that someone else’s philosophy of urban life and governance is still baked into much of what a rider sees and experiences, whether they’re consciously aware of it or not. Of course, these days you probably shouldn’t look around too closely, in case your wallet vanishes or you get pushed into an oncoming train. Manslaughter is rare in the subway, the February murder of Michelle Alyssa Go at the Times Square station notwithstanding. But a few weeks ago, I saw someone on the platform of a Bushwick station stuffing hypodermic needles into a backpack, a cargo with the potential to cause more death and chaos than any one-off act of homicide. The station, like many others, now has a semi-permanent homeless population, which, like much else in town, has proven stubbornly immune to all attempts at good-faith public assistance. The suddenly dungeonlike physical space is filled with the human ruins of the unfeeling upper world, peopled with the homeless and the mentally disturbed and the drug-addicted who, as a matter of policy and custom and winter weather, have now been warehoused underground.
During a recent train delay, I noticed the contrast between the already decades-old white-lettered metal and plastic signage indicating the station, attached to each support column and rendered with the soullessness of industrial labeling, and the dark burgundy 1920s mosaic on the platform wall, the words “Pacific Street” radiating from a squash-court-sized mosaic fit for a Roman villa. Once these really were stations of the elevated, not just an extension of city life but something close to its highest ideal. Now, these awesome caverns are part of a system for herding millions of masked abstractions, something it does very poorly and in a way that makes you feel tiny and empty and mentally and physically battered. No wonder, then, that a moving company called Roadway did its own eye-catching subway buy a few months ago: “The city will still be here if you ever want to move back,” their ads read, maybe too optimistically.
Armin Rosen is a New York-based reporter-at-large for Tablet.
