Subwayland (2 page)

I was raised in a farming town in West Texas called Plains, population about 1,400, where my abiding desire as a teenager was to live any place where I would be able to walk out the front door and see people I didn't know. My train car this morning, in fact every car I take every morning, fulfills that requirement quite well. It is 9:45. There are about 80 people in here with me, half of them standing, as I am. I know none of them, except one woman seated behind me in the corner, whom I recognize from work. We make eye contact but come to that immediate wordless understanding that acquaintances and sometimes even spouses reach on morning subway trips. She wants to read her newspaper; I want to write in my notebook. We agree to ignore each other. This is fine. (In other cities, people go to work alone, with their thoughts and their car radios. For most, it is the only private time of the day. The subway serves the same purpose, except that New Yorkers must seek their privacy in the most public place imaginable—along with a million others seeking the same thing.)

In the car with me this morning is the usual mix of the mundane and the subtly marvelous that constitute the land of the subway. A few feet away, a seated man with long sideburns is about halfway through a dog-eared paperback of “Lawrence of Arabia.” On one side of him is a small man reading the sports pages of a Chinese newspaper. On the other side is another small man reading an article about the Rev. Al Sharpton in a Russian newspaper. Across from them is a tall elderly man wearing a felt yarmulke and fancy running shoes, hunched intently over a Hebrew prayer book. The only person I can hear talking in the entire car is a skinny teenager in a Knicks jersey, hitting on a woman in a flower-print skirt, both of them crowded near a door. He's saying to her, “You ain't
heard
me sing yet,” and she's smiling. Seated inches away but oblivious to this conversation because of his headphones is a man wearing black sunglasses, black jeans and a black T-shirt with the words “No, I will not fix your computer” written across his chest.

Further up, a woman with long black hair is scooping it behind her ears and beginning to apply her makeup methodically with a small compact mirror. Over the bridge she is brushing on rouge. By Canal Street she has moved to eyeliner, penciled on carefully between lurches. By Union Square it is lip liner and between 23rd and 28th lipstick the color of a city fire truck. Meanwhile, the man reading “Lawrence of Arabia” has laid it on his lap. His reading companions have departed, and he is trying to sleep but managing only the thousand-yard subway stare, the kind seen on the faces in the hidden-camera photographs Walker Evans took aboard the trains in the late 1930's. I finally get off at Times Square, just behind the man who will not fix my computer, the praying man and the skinny Don Juan, whose object of affection seems to have disappeared somewhere along the way.

A calculation occurred to me as I watched my fellow riders that morning. If a New Yorker averages half an hour on the subway every day over the course of his or her adult life, say 50 years, this adds up to slightly more than a
year
spent in the subway. It adds up, in other words, to a whole lot of life being lived down there. And it helps explain why the subway has played so many roles in the life of its city over the last century. Besides being the people's limousine, it has been, by turns, a lunchroom, a library, a dormitory, a chapel, a concert hall, a bazaar, a Bowery mission and a boudoir. It has served as a deathbed and, many times, a maternity ward for babies who could not wait until the next stop. It has been the city's biggest singles scene and its biggest station wagon. Sometimes, late on weekend nights, it smells like a saloon. Early in the 21st century, it is now officially impossible to imagine this city without it.

The first time my parents visited New York, in the early 90's, I was a little nervous about taking them on the train. I decided that we would start out at the Court Street station in Brooklyn Heights, near my apartment, because it was relatively nice-looking and clean, a gentle introduction. But as soon as the elevator doors parted on the mezzanine, we found ourselves in very close proximity to a very large man who was calmly relieving himself in a corner. I felt my mother stiffen. I think my dad grinned. I was horrified at first. But then, as we hurried past the man and his puddle, I thought: What better introduction to a place where you can see anything?

After three years of writing this column, I sometimes feel as if I've seen everything there is to see in the subway. Thankfully, I'm proven wrong every day.

1

CITIZENS OF THE SUBWAY

The last great democracy: On the subway, the mayor is just another man in search of a seat.

 

 

SMITTEN BY THE SUBWAY

If you have set foot on a subway platform during the last 20 years, there is a decent chance that he has been standing there next to you, a small, smiling man in no hurry to catch a train.

He was probably carrying a green satchel with a tiny American flag stitched on the flap. From this satchel, he probably produced a pair of junk-store binoculars or a camera and pointed one in the direction of a rust-stained wall that seemed to warrant neither close inspection nor documentation.

You probably did not notice him. He tends to fade into the tilework. And that is how Philip Ashforth Coppola of Maplewood, N.J., likes it. But once, on August 29, 1978, he pinned a plastic envelope to his shirt, slipped a name tag inside and summoned up the courage to conduct his own private poll at four Midtown subway stations. As he later wrote, he “collared whoever looked like a likely candidate,” and with all the intensity of the Ancient Mariner, he asked a question:

“Are you aware of the subway art?”

The art to which Mr. Coppola referred was the art that he loves most in the world, the masterpieces in mosaic, faience, terra cotta, tile and steel that a grander generation of public builders bequeathed the humble and hurried subway rider.

That summer morning, his questions elicited mostly ignorance and indifference. But the subject mattered dearly to Mr. Coppola for a couple of reasons. One was that so many of his beloved treasures were either crumbling or being blithely entombed in subway renovations.

Another reason was that Mr. Coppola, then on the verge of turning 30, a sometime dishwasher, sometime printing press operator with little training in design and none in writing, had just decided to devote the rest of his life to writing and publishing at his own expense an exhaustive, multivolume, painstakingly detailed history of the design and decoration of every one of the stations—496, by his count—that ever existed in the subway system.

In the pantheon of the New York City subway buff, a loose fraternity of urban transit fans who range from simple romantics to near-maniacs, you could think of Mr. Coppola as the obsessive's obsessive.

He does not, like one buff in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, have a mock-up of a motorman's cab in his bedroom, supplemented with recorded sounds from the subway to make sitting in the cab feel more authentic.

He does not, like another buff in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, live in an apartment that has been converted into a miniature subway system, full of expensive handmade model trains.

He certainly does not, like one veteran buff who turns up at Transit Authority functions, sport a large tattoo of a subway car on his bicep.

But what Mr. Coppola has done takes him far beyond the bounds of even the most devoted railroad hobbyist. For a quarter of a century, he has spent nearly every spare minute of his life—weekends, vacations, long nights too many to count—haunting subway stations, libraries, archives, museums and creaky microfilm readers in search of even the tiniest shards of fact for his masterwork.

He could have ended up another Joe Gould, the Greenwich Village eccentric who claimed to have written a nine-million-word opus called “The Oral History of Our Time,” largely drawn from overheard conversations and, in the end, largely existing only in Mr. Gould's imagination.

But Mr. Coppola was not just a dreamer. In 1984, after almost six years of hovering over his sketch pad and his I.B.M. Selectric II, he self-published the first heavy volume of “Silver Connections: A Fresh Perspective on the New York Area Subway Systems.” Another volume appeared in 1990 and a third in 1994. The fourth and most recent, a thick digression that covers the design of the old Manhattan and Hudson Railroad, came out in 1999. And after revising the first volume (“Simply far too much purple prose in that one,” he says, warning, “Do not read too deeply into it.”) he plans to begin No. 5, which he hopes will appear in 2004 and take the subway saga all the way up to 1915. Through the years, he even built a readership, including the artist Roy Lichtenstein, who consulted the volumes when making the subway mural that now hangs in Times Square.

Stacked on top of one another, the volumes, published in small batches, measure nine inches. Not counting the mind-boggling bibliographies and indexes, they add up to more than 1,900 pages, several hundred thousand words and more than one thousand of Mr. Coppola's hand drawings.

Mr. Coppola is now 52 years old.

He has 404 more subway stations to go.

“I always thought nine was a good round number, nine volumes,” he says. “Now I am not so sure.”

He hopes his readers will like his volumes, of course. But you get the sneaking sense from Mr. Coppola that his most devoted reader will always be Philip Ashforth Coppola.

“Now if you're not the sort to be terribly concerned about whence there came the New York subway, nor how it came about,” he writes in the introduction to Volume I, “then I still suggest you keep this book on your bedside table, in case you can't sleep some night; I especially recommend my thoughts upon the extensions to the upper Broadway stations, found in my review of the 137th Street IRT station (pp. 338-341).

“A paragraph or two,” he adds, “should send you off splendidly.”

To outsiders, the world of Mr. Coppola, the world of the true subway buff, or rail fan, as many like to be called, has never been easy to visit.

On some level, of course, every New Yorker has felt the fascination. The subway has always meant a lot more to the city than just a way to get around. As much as the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building, it has represented the monumental ambition of the city itself. It has also been one of the best methods for veteran New Yorkers to travel back in time, to the old neighborhood, to the transit gloria of Ebbets Field, to that rite of passage when they were finally old enough to ride by themselves.

Many buffs approach the subway as pure sentimentalists, drawn to the subject by a mixture of nostalgia and municipal pride. These are the buffs who know the map so well they don't have to look at it, the ones who like to stare out the front windows of trains, who still argue about the relative merits of the IRT over the BMT in an age when few commuters know what the letters ever meant. (The Interborough Rapid Transit system is now the numbered lines, and the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit system is part of the lettered lines.)

These are buffs like Stan Fischler, who has written four books on New York subways and trolleys. His favorite facts are the purely personal ones, such as how the old BMT “standard” cars had a jump seat that folded down so that a 5-year-old Stan could stand on it and stick his head out the front window. Or how the old trains on the Brighton Line, as they passed the curve at Beverly Road, used to bang out a rhythm that sounded exactly like the drumbeat in Benny Goodman's “China Boy.”

“When I first found out it was a nickel,” said Mr. Fischler, “I said to myself, ‘Oh my
God,
I'd pay five bucks for something like this, easy.' For a kid, it was paradise.”

But the subway also tends to take its votaries to levels of fascination where most people find the air too thin.

In many ways, of course, they are no different from any other hardcore buffs: Trekkies, Civil War re-enactors, J. F. K. assassination buffs who come to blows over the role of the umbrella man in Dealey Plaza.

But while the lure of those subjects is somewhat apparent, it is not as easy to figure out what motivates the dedicated rail fan.

One of the telltale signs is that he—it is nearly always a he; most rail fans are male, middle-aged and single; the married ones call their wives “rail widows”—can sit for several hours watching stunningly prosaic slides of subway trains that, to the untrained eye, all look pretty much identical.

But for the buff, a train picture holds the same appeal that a pinned butterfly holds for a lepidopterist. At an early summer meeting of the New York chapter of the Electric Railroaders' Association, a club formed in the early 1950's, about two hundred people filled an auditorium at the College of Insurance in Lower Manhattan to see the work of Harold Pinsker, a popular amateur train photographer, who presented what the program called “a mix of his best slides from the 1980's.”