Denise, June 2004
My father worked for the Transit Authority in New York City, which ran the subway system. He counted money in the days before there were tokens. He would be astounded by the new swipe cards. We rode the subway often as he had a pass. When I was small, he would flash his pass at the fare window and would tell me he had shown them my picture and that caused them to let us ride for free. So, I have a long-term affinity for public transportation.
The subways in those days were not sleek, bright steel as they are today but black iron and they came screeching and roaring through the stations, like a carriage from Hell, raising clouds of the block soot that covered the platform floors; and surrounding you with a typhoon of cold, dank, gritty air. It was both terrifying and wonderful. There were three main lines of the system, the IRT, the BMT and the IND, and hundreds of stops, and there seemed always to be the possibility that you might step onto the car in the black and white tile, brightly lit station and streak off into the pitch dark tunnels and never be seen again; or that you would fall asleep and wake up all the way out at the end of the line in Pelham Bay. The subways were full of mystery and danger. As a child, if you were not quick and attentive you could miss the sliding doors and be left behind. Worse, you could get stuck in the door, as I heard that a man once did, his arm sticking outside and torn off by a stanchion as the train hurtled into the tunnel. And then there was the dreaded third rail that ran all along the tracks, carrying massive voltages of electricity that would cause you to be instantly fried like a strip of bacon if you but touched it. The 1997 movie Mimic depicted giant cockroach/people living in the tunnels and swooping down to carry off passengers on lonely subway stations. It was filmed in Toronto where their subway still looks very 1950’s, all narrow platforms and white tile walls, but I think of the bug-like creatures every time I ride any subway. The subway is often romanticized in fiction. The TV show, Beauty and the Beast, featured a colony of people living under the subway tunnels in mock Victorian splendor led by a lion –faced, but romantic “beast” named Vincent. The reality is different. The 1995 book, The Mole People, by Jennifer Toth, documented the real people, homeless and desperate, who live in nothing like splendor in the caves and dark spaces in abandoned tunnels.
We went everywhere by subway. We went every June to Coney Island, a long ride for a child, but for the last half hour you could smell the salt air and cotton candy and know you were almost there.
A shorter ride would get you downtown to walk along 5th Avenue or Broadway; or uptown to ice skate in Van Cortland Park.
The elevated subway lines whisked you past apartments where you could look in the windows on an early dark winter evening and see families sitting down to supper as if on a stage. And if you watched out the window as you hurtled though the tunnels, you would see winking red and green lights, the blur of other trains passing and the showers of sparks that flew from the rails. If you had to stand you learned to have “subway legs” and to hold your ground in the swaying, lurching trains. You held onto the overheard straps or, if you were short, the middle poles and tried not to get swept out the door with the crowd when the doors opened.
Other forms of transportation did not have the romance of the subway or train, but you could still go places.
Railroads have their own mystique, whether a distant train whistle in the night, or a giant engine sitting, steaming, at the station in the cool morning air. The trains are the old-world monarchs of public transportation, with their urban palaces, Grand Central and Penn Station, built of marble and brass and vaulted ceilings. Arriving and departing from those monuments to mobility was a brief sojourn in opulence.
City buses went everywhere you could want to go. I traveled to high school on the buses, and sometimes, on our days off my friend and I would use our student bus passes to take one of the many buses that served our neighborhood to the end of the line just for the ride.
Newer subways systems have charms that the old subway didn’t. The Washington, D.C. Metro is shiny and bright with high cast concrete ceilings and lights set into the platforms that blink when the train is coming. Electric letter signs tell you how long you will have to wait till the next train gets there. Comfortable, colorful seats fill the roomy cars which don’t lurch as badly as the old trains. There are stops to get you anywhere you might want to go in the city and suburbs. Most stations are now handicapped accessible and have towering escalators to the street. There is something magical about emerging from a hole in the ground in the middle of a bustling National Mall or Federal Triangle.
The Baltimore Metro has artwork at each of its 13 stations from giant iron sculptures of children and toys at Milford Mill to neon-like plastic piping at Owings Mills. Each station has its own design. The problem with this city’s system is it has only one line. If you are not going from Owings Mills to the Harbor or over to the Johns Hopkins Hospital, you are out of luck, transit wise.
But then Baltimore also has the light rail. The nifty trolley-like blue and white cars, powered by overhead electric lines, rattle along Howard Street from Hunt Valley to Cherry Hill, making good time until they hit the congestion below North Avenue. From there they creep along to stop right beside Oriole Stadium at Camden Yards and then continue down through the Southern part of the city. Above ground travel is much pleasanter for claustrophobic window gazers, but slower, since it is dependent on the street traffic. The cars are filled with commuters on weekdays and with purple or orange clad Ravens or Orioles fans, and cheerful tourists on the way to the ballparks or the Harbor, on weekends. The light rail lines connect with Amtrak at Penn Stations and with the MARC regional trains at several points. A tiny bus painted to look like a ladybug trundles from the light rail stop at Woodberry along the famous Hampden “Avenue” for shoppers.
Perhaps the best thing about public transportation, aside from the environmental and parking advantages, is the onboard entertainment. Never have I ridden any of the above systems without someone providing some sort of floorshow. On the light rail there is a poet who rides regularly and who stands in the aisle and recites his own poetry. He looks like a street person, but the poetry is quite good, and he does well in his subsequent collection. On the Baltimore Metro people sell watches and exotic oils and sunglasses. On the old NYC subway there was usually a preacher or singer or someone just generally giving vent to his opinions. Currently, there are street musicians playing in many large New York City subway stops and the sounds of drums or keyboard or clarinet resound strangely and wonderfully in the large multileveled spaces. In diverse Washington D.C., riding in the trains is like a visit to the United Nations. You hear a symphony of languages and voices. Young families, government workers, students and many, many tourists fill the cars. The tourists are the happiest, out for a day of sightseeing and glad to be on vacation. Even suit-wearing workers seem glad not to be in the horrendous traffic of D.C. and quietly immerse themselves in their newspapers.
Perhaps my warm feelings about public transportation are related to my love/hate (mostly hate) relationship with cars. There is a freedom to driving a car, a feeling that you can pick up and go anywhere anytime, that you can escape the dreariness of daily life by taking to the road. There is also the other side of driving; the natural terror, that we seem to have repressed, of hurtling down the road at 60 miles per hour in a tin can, surrounded by other tin cans going just as fast; and giant eighteen-wheeled cans with dubious brakes behind us. And most of the time we are not even adventuring so much as going to work or to the store to get a video. Driving in cars is an exercise in isolation, competitiveness, and alienation. Road rage does not originate in happy feelings.
Parking those cars is an exercise in futility. Often, in downtown Baltimore or worse, Washington D. C., there is just no place at all to park. Even the high priced ($10-$15 a day) parking garages are often filled, and you could spend an entire day out circling the block looking for any place to abandon your car.
Public transportation, like public education, or public parks, or street fairs, is an act of community. It is an act of faith that getting on at one stop, you will go where the sign says it is going. There is a communal faith among riders that the Hunt Valley car will actually go to Hunt Valley. All of the riders entrust their lives to the one driver. They share a sense of space (crowded) and a sense of time (often slow).
Public transportation is communal. There is a certain camaraderie to riding together, a sharing of the concerns, “What time do you think the train will get here?” or “What did he say?” when there is the usual mechanically garbled announcement. Even if they do not talk, commuters are in fact sharing a common experience, often the same experience every day.
Tired commuters on the subway sit in compatible silence, but at the airport or train station there is a palpable excitement and undercurrent of grief as crowds of people stand by the gate getting a last hug from a departing loved one or bouncing on their toes in expectation of seeing a familiar face coming through the door. Stations and airports seem to be to be sort of liminal situations, when the doors of life are swinging open and shut. The joy of arriving and greeting seems reminiscent of birth; and the sadness of separation, a tiny echo of death. I stood at the airport one day seeing off a traveling college-aged child and near me were an older daughter, maybe forty-five, and an elderly mother doing the same dance of “Well, have a good trip,” a hug, and “ See you at Christmas” And I thought, we all spend our whole lives doing this.
Public transportation is tolerant. I rode the light rail one day with an elderly street person solemnly telling his life story to no one in particular; a huge bald, wrestler-type man who was also conversing loudly over an earphone; and a skinny young man with tattoos and a bicycle.
Public transportation is fun. There is a certain amusement park type charm to figuring out the fare card system, making your way up and down escalators, and finally riding fast in someone else’s vehicle.
Public transportation is sophisticated. Not everyone has the poise to balance on their feet in a moving car while doing the newspaper crossword puzzle, or the confidence to stand elbow to elbow with a crowd of strangers without ever looking anyone in the eye.
If just the idea of hurtling along in the dark underground is not enough excitement, the real adventure begins when the power goes out. I was once trapped in the New York City subway during a blackout. There was no air conditioning and the only light was the red glow of the emergency bulbs. It got hot and stuffy fast, and a few people began to verbalize their panic by wailing and screaming. After a half hour or so of this misery, a conductor did pry open the doors and we were able to walk along the catwalk at the side of the tunnel in the eerie red gloom, mindful of the rats scuttling below, into the station and up the stairs into the darkened city.
Riding public transportation is a way of participating in public life. Some people thing that we, as a nation, have disconnected, and are cocooning in our own homes rather than participating in civic, fraternal or cultural organizations. But if you go to the Inner Harbor on a sunny day or the Washington D.C. mall in the summer, or Times Square at any time of the day or night, you will see we are still people who like to gather; to see, to overhear each other in our endless diversity. We derive energy from crowds and find enjoyment in the proximity of large groups of others. I like that about us. At Artscape, stages set up throughout downtown Baltimore host Salsa bands and African troupes with drummers and barefoot dancers. I think anything that involves dancing in the street is bound to be good for us as humans. Street festivals dedicated to ethnic holidays like St Anthony Festival in Little Italy; to art or music like Artscape; or just to a celebration of city life, like the Inner Harbor, are expressions of community, of humanity, of a celebration of our commonness and an antidote to the technological isolation of modern day.
Despite the many fears after 9/11, people still flock by the thousands to these meccas of public life. The crowd at the lighting of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree flows out of the Center and down Fifth Avenue. Thousands of people spend two or three hours, on the night of July 4th, getting home from fireworks displays on the Mall. It is a sign of the health of our society that we still congregate, that we can still play together, celebrate together, travel together.