NEW YORK – Sunday marks 120 years the New York City subway system opened to the public.
There’s a pace to subway hopping that doesn’t just come from the trains themselves. You might even hear musicians beating to the beat of their own drums, and a heartbeat can be heard from subway trains vibrating through neighborhoods.
There is an underground culture and it means something to the millions of travelers who depend on the metro.
The art of subway graffiti
Led Black – a writer, blogger and entrepreneur who grew up in Washington Heights – says he can attest to the energy emerging from above and below.
The 191st Street stop on Line 1, the city’s deepest metro station, aroused his appreciation for the ‘iron horse’. The MTA says the station is 150 feet below street level. The only way to reach the platform from Sinterklaasslaan is by elevator, or by going through it an almost 300 meter long tunnel filled with art and graffiti from Broadway.
“This is my home base. I spent a lot of my childhood here. When I come to these walls and see the art on them, it always takes my breath away,” Black said.
Black has been on the subway all his life and mainly remembers a different time, when the trains were a bit dark.
Public transport advocate Lisa Daglian says the 1970s were a difficult period.
“They were filthy, and they were dirty… So much attention has gone into making sure there’s money to maintain the infrastructure and also the appearance,” she said.
But Black says, despite the setbacks, “it’s just integral, essential and indispensable… I remember taking the 4 train and looking out the window, into the car and out the window, and it was all art.”
How the metro’s rough past has shaped contemporary culture
Not everyone saw the image of the metro positively at that time.
Crime also played a roleresulting in a low number of passengers. Historians say that in September 1979 there were as many as 250 crimes per week, making the crime rate higher than any other public transport system in the world.
But Concetta Bencivenga, director of the New York Transit Museum, says the subway’s rough past has shaped contemporary culture.
“There are very few examples in our culture, in modern culture, where you can see a snippet of something or hear a snippet of sound and just know, oh, that’s New York,” she said.
An example of this is when hip-hop music took off in the Bronx in 1973.
Black says he remembers hip-hop and its culture quickly becoming part of the metro’s identity.
Today, the vibrancy of this gigantic system has undoubtedly become iconic. Appearing in films, TV shows, music videos and, more recently, in social media posts.
“It almost becomes a tapestry of the city. Without the ubiquity of the trains, you don’t really have a city,” Black said.
