Sunrise with Seamonsters (42 page)

New Yorkers make it their business to avoid getting lost. It is the stranger who sees people hurrying into the stairwell: subway entrances are just dark holes in the sidewalk—the stations are below-ground. There is nearly always a bus-stop near the subway entrance. People waiting at a bus-stop have a special pitying gaze for people entering the subway. It is sometimes not pity, but fear, bewilderment, curiosity, or fatalism; often they look like miners' wives watching their menfolk going down the pit.

The stranger's sense of disorientation down below is immediate. The station is all tile and iron and dampness; it has bars and turnstiles and steel grates. It has the look of an old prison or a monkey cage. Buying a token the stranger may ask directions, but the token booth—reinforced, burglarproof, bulletproof—renders the reply incoherent. And subway directions are a special language.

"A-train ... Downtown ... Express to the Shuttle ... Change at Ninety-sixth for the two ... Uptown ... The Lex ... CC ... LL ... The Local..."

Most New Yorkers refer to the subway by the now obsolete forms "IND," "IRT," "BMT." No one intentionally tries to confuse the stranger; it is just that, where the subway is concerned, precise directions are very hard to convey.

Verbal directions are incomprehensible, written ones are defaced. The signboards and subway maps are indiscernible beneath layers of graffiti. That Andy Warhol, the stylish philistine, has said, "I love graffiti" is almost reason enough to hate them. One is warier still of Norman Mailer who naively encouraged this public scrawling in his book
The Faith of Graffiti.

Graffiti are destructive; they are anti-art; they are an act of violence, and they can be deeply menacing. They have displaced the subway signs and maps, blacked-out the windows of the trains, and obliterated the instructions.
In case of emergency—
is cross-hatched with a felt-tip;
These seats are for the elderly and disabled
—a yard-long signature obscures it;
The subway tracks are very dangerous. If the train should stop, do not
—the rest is black and unreadable. The stranger cannot rely on printed instructions or warnings, and there are few cars out of the six thousand on the system in which the maps have not been torn out. Assuming the stranger has boarded the train, he can only feel panic when, searching for a clue to his route, he sees in the map-frame the message,
Guzmán—Ladrón, Maricón y Asesino.

Panic: and so he gets off the train, and then his troubles really begin.

He may be in the South Bronx or the upper reaches of Broadway on the Number One line, or on any one of a dozen lines that traverse Brooklyn. He gets off the train, which is covered in graffiti, and steps onto a station platform which is covered in graffiti. It is possible (this is true of many stations) that none of the signs will be legible. Not only will the stranger not know where he is, but the stairways will be splotched and stinking—no
Uptown,
no
Downtown,
no
Exit.
It is also possible that not a single soul will be around, and the most dangerous stations—ask any police officer—are the emptiest. Of course, the passenger might just want to sit on a broken bench and, taking Mailer's word for it, contemplate the
macho
qualities of the graffiti; on the other hand, he is more likely to want to get the hell out of there.

This is the story that most people tell of subway fear—the predicament of having boarded the wrong train and gotten off at a distant station; of being on an empty platform, waiting for a train which shows no sign of coming. Then the vandalized station signs, the crazy semiliterate messages, the monkey scratches on the walls, the dampness, the neglect, the visible evidence of destruction and violence—they all combine to produce a sense of disgust and horror.

In every detail it is like a nightmare, complete with rats and mice and a tunnel and a low ceiling. It is manifest suffocation straight out of Poe. And some of these stations have long platforms—you have to squint to see what is at the far end. These distances intensify a person's fear, and so do all the pillars behind which any ghoul could be lurking. Is it any
wonder that, having once strayed into this area of subterranean gothic, people decide that the subway is not for them?

But those who tell this story seldom have a crime to report. They have experienced shock, and fear, and have gone weak at the knees. It is completely understandable—what is worse than being trapped underground?—but it has been a private little horror. In most cases the person will have come to no harm. But he will remember his fear on that empty station for the rest of his life.

When New Yorkers recount an experience like this they are invariably speaking of something that happened on another line, not their usual route. Their own line is fairly safe, they'll say; it's cleaner than the others, it's got a little charm, it's kind of dependable, they've been taking it for years. Your line has crazy people on it, but my line has "characters." This sense of loyalty to a regularly-used line is the most remarkable thing about the subway passenger in New York. It is, in fact, a jungle attitude.

"New York is a jungle," the tourist says, and he believes he has made a withering criticism. But all very large cities are jungles, which is to say that they are dense and dark and full of surprises and strange growths; they are hard to read, hard to penetrate; strange people live in them; and they contain mazy areas of great danger. The jungle aspect of cities (and of New York City in particular) is the most interesting thing about them—the way people behave in this jungle, and adapt to it; the way they change it or are changed by it.

In any jungle, the pathway is a priority. People move around New York in various ways, but the complexities of the subway have allowed the New Yorker to think of his own route as something personal, even
original.
No one uses maps on the subway—you seldom see any. Most subway passengers were shown how to ride it by parents or friends. Then habit turns it into instinct, just like a trot down a jungle path. The passenger knows where he is going because he never diverges from his usual route. But that is also why, unless you are getting off at precisely his stop, he cannot tell you how to get where you're going.

The only other way of learning how to use the subway is by maps and charts—teaching yourself. This very hard work requires imagination and intelligence. It means navigating in four dimensions. No one can do it idly, and I doubt that many people take up subway riding in their middle years.

In general, people have a sense of pride in their personal route; they may be superstitious about it and even a bit secretive. Vaguely fearful of other routes, they may fantasize about them—these "dangerous" lines that run through unknown districts. This provokes them to assign a specific character to the other lines. The IRT is the oldest line; for some people it is dependable, with patches of elegance (those beaver mosaics at
Astor Place commemorating John Jacob Astor's fur business), and for others it is dangerous and dirty. One person praises the IND, another person damns it. "I've got a soft spot for the BMT," a woman told me, but found it hard to explain why. "Take the 'A' train," I was told. "That's the best one, like the song." But some of the worst stations are on the (very long) 'A' line. The 'CC', 8th Avenue local, was described to me as "scuzz"—disreputable—but this train, running from Bedford Park Boulevard, The Bronx, via Manhattan and Brooklyn, to Rockaway Park, Queens, covers a distance of 32.39 miles. The fact is that for some of these miles it is pleasant and for others it is not. There is part of one line that is indisputably bad; that is, the stretch of the '2' line (IRT) from Nostrand to New Lots Avenue. It is dangerous and ugly and when you get to New Lots Avenue you cannot imagine why you went. The police call this line "The Beast."

But people in the know—the police, the Transit Authority, the people who travel throughout the system—say that one line is pretty much like another.

"Is this line bad?" I asked Robert Huber of the Transit Authority, and pointed to the map in his office.

"The whole system is bad," he said. "From 1904 until just a few years ago it went unnoticed. People took it for granted. In 1975, the first year of the fiscal crisis, Mayor Beame ordered cutbacks. They started a program of deferred maintenance—postponed servicing and just attended to the most serious deficiencies. After four or five years of deferred maintenance, the bottom fell out. In January-February, 1981, twenty-five per cent of the trains were out of service, and things got worse—soon a thirty minute trip was taking an hour and a half. No one was putting any money into it. But of course they never had. It was under-capitalized from the beginning. Now there is decay everywhere, but there is also a real determination to reverse that trend and get it going right."

No train is entirely good or bad, crime-ridden or crime-free. The trains carry crime with them, picking it up in one area and bringing it to another. They pass through a district and take on the characteristics of that place. The South Bronx is regarded as a High Risk area, but seven lines pass through it, taking vandals and thieves all over the system. There is a species of vandalism that was once peculiar to the South Bronx: boys would swing on the stanchions—those chrome poles in the center of the car—and raising themselves sideways until they were parallel with the floor they would kick hard against a window and burst it. Now this South Bronx window-breaking technique is universal throughout the system. Except for the people who have the misfortune to travel on "The Beast" no one can claim that his train is much better
or worse than any other. This business about one line being dependable and another being charming and a third being dangerous is just jungle talk.

The whiff of criminality, the atmosphere of viciousness, is so strong in the stations and trains that it does little good to say that, relatively speaking, crime is not that serious on the subway. Of course, many crimes go unreported on the subway, but this is also true outside the transit system. In one precinct they might have seventy-seven murders in a year, which makes the thirteen on the subway in 1981 look mild by comparison. In the same year there were thirty-five rapes and rape attempts (an attempt is classified as rape), which again, while nothing to crow about, is not as bad as is widely believed ("I'll bet they have at least one rape a day," a girl told me, and for that reason she never took the subway). The majority of subway crime is theft—bag-snatching; this is followed by robbery—the robber using a gun or knife. There are about thirty-two robberies or snatches a day in the system, and one or two cases of aggravated assault a day. This takes care of all "Part I Offenses"—the serious ones.

It is the obvious vandalism on the subways that conveys the feeling of lawlessness. Indeed, the first perception of subway crime came with the appearance of widespread graffiti in 1970. It was then that passengers took fright and ridership, which had been declining slowly since the 'fifties, dropped rapidly. Passengers felt threatened, and newspapers gave prominence to subway crime. Although the 'CC' line is over thirty-two miles long a passenger will be alarmed to hear that a crime has been committed on it, because this is
his
line, and the proprietorial feeling of a rider for his line is as strong as a jungle dweller for his regular path. Subway passengers are also very close physically to one another, but this is a city in which people are accustomed to quite a lot of space. On the subway you can hear the breathing of the person next to you—that is, when the train is at the station. The rest of the time it is impossible to hear anything except the thundering of the train, which is equally frightening.

"Violence underground attracts more coverage in the papers, but it is foolish to imagine the subway is some sort of death trap." This statement was not made by anyone in the New York Transit Authority, but by Nadine Joly, the twenty-eight-year-old head of the Special Paris Metro Security Squad. She was speaking about the Paris Metro, but her sentiments are quite similar to those of Edward Silberfarb of the Transit Authority Police.

"The interest in subway crime is much greater than in street crime," Mr Silberfarb said. "Crime actually went down six per cent in September, but the paper reversed the statistic and reported it as having gone up. Maybe they're looking for headlines."

The most frequent complaint of subway passengers is not about crime. It is, by a wide margin, about delayed trains and slow service. The second largest category of complaint is about the discourtesy of conductors or token-sellers; and the third concerns unclean stations. "Mainly the smell of urine—it's really horrible at some stations," said Mr Huber of the Transit Authority.

The perception of crime is widespread, and yet statistically the experience of it is quite small.

"But what do those statistics matter to someone who is in a car and a gang of six guys starts teasing and then threatening the passengers?" the New York lawyer, Arthur'S. Penn remarked to me. "Or that other familiar instance—you get into a car and there's one guy way down at the end sitting all by himself, and the rest of the people are crowded up this end of the car. You know from experience that the man who's sitting alone is crazy, and then, when the train pulls out, he starts screaming..."

Discomfort, anxiety, fear—these are the responses of most passengers. No wonder people complain that the trains are too slow: when one is fearful, every trip takes too long. In fact, these are among the fastest subway trains in the world. Stan Fischler, in his enthusiastic history of the system,
Uptown, Downtown
(1976) gives fifty-five mph as the top speed of an average express, such as the Harlem-Bronx 'D'. The train going by sounds as if it is full of coal, but when one is inside, it can feel like a trip on "The Wild Mouse."

People's fears can be at odds with reality. It is interesting that the two most famous movies with New York subway settings,
The Incident
(about a gang terrorizing a group of passengers on an express), and
The Taking of Pelham
1–2–3 (about the hijacking of an IRT train) are both preposterous. But as fantasies they give expression to widely-held fears of subway violence. (The famous chase in
The French Connection
starts at Bay 50th on the B-line and finishes deep in Bensonhurst on the West End line.)