Its High Times Again on a Train Bound for Nowhere
Song of the Subway: Walt Whitman on the Downtown Express
As New York returns, and the trains are running 24 hours a day again, allow u.s. pause to marvel at the convulsive wonder underneath our very anxiety.
I wasn't thinking nearly Walt Whitman when I hopped on the subway at 72nd and Broadway. My time was curt, and I wanted merely to become downward to Chambers Street as quickly as possible, earlier the courthouses on Foley Square closed. But what happened on the first leg of my trip prompted my own poor imitation of a Whitman poem. Phone call information technology "Song of the Subway."
Had Whitman lived a bit longer, and been in an unaccustomed rush, maybe he would have immortalized the subway ride from Brooklyn to Mannahatta the way he already had crossing via ferry. And were he around at present — though, of class, he's forever reminding us that he is — he might have rhapsodized nearly how the subway, which only a twelvemonth agone shut downwardly every night for the first time in its 117-year history, now stands for a city coming off the ropes.
There's no poetry in the give-and-take "infrastructure," a give-and-take, I'grand pretty sure, Whitman never used. But I'd bet he'd have regarded the subterranean tube running the length of Manhattan as another open road, equally worthy of praise.
I know that the interval between 72nd and 42nd on the 3 train is not the longest in the subway system, nor, as far as I know, has anyone composed a ditty about it. That distinction belongs to the stretch between Columbus Circle and 125th Street on the A line.
But the men behind New York's outset subway lines, known to old-timers as the IRT and BMT (every bit opposed to the municipal bean-counters who congenital the A and D of the IND some 30 years later), were out to dazzle. The stations they created were both handsome — how else to explain how the elegant rectangular tiles lining their walls at present adorn the bathrooms of people besides fancy to ride the trains? — and k, featuring those wonderful, whimsical mosaics. Many have been restored, and the cars running through them are bright and shiny.
By dissimilarity, the A and D lines, completed nether Mayor LaGuardia, were utilitarian for starters and left to rot always since: While some of the cars engagement back to Mayor Wagner, the ambient grime seems untouched since Mayors Impellitteri and O'Dwyer. Even Whitman, who loved all conveyances carrying lots of people, couldn't accept establish anything poetic well-nigh them. The trains on those misbegotten lines take forever to come, as if, mindful of their grim destinations, they never really desire to arrive.
Only but as I entered the sometime subway shelter on 72nd Street, the one with the elegant Dutch facade, the monitor over the turnstile reading "No. three. New Lots Av" switched from solid chartreuse to pulsating bister: My train was pulling in. With that swift swipe New Yorkers take perfected and a burst downwards the stairs, I could brand it.
As always, I surveyed the assembled people with whom I'd share my journey — another advantage of the trains over antisocial cabs and Uber — and settled in for the ride. But another awareness before long distracted me: After a slow start, the motorman had opened upwardly the throttle.
It rarely happens. There are all those decrepit hundred-year-old signals you're always hearing about, the ones taking another hundred years to be replaced. And that ubiquitous "train traffic in front end of us." And those tyrannical, anonymous dispatchers who, we're informed, are forever holding trains in stations. Or the assorted, unexplained stops and slowdowns that capture the subway's festering wounds. Simply this day at least, marshaling all the power at its control, the train was soon hurtling, careening — "careering," Whitman might have said — down the tracks. The sleepy backwaters of the Broadway Local, its patrons watching forlornly from the platforms, flashed by in blurs — 66th Street! 59th! 50th! — getting the dorsum of the hand from the mighty, haughty Express.
There was absolutely nothing elegant nearly information technology — "No sugariness debonair of tearful harp or glib piano thine," as Whitman wrote in "To a Locomotive in Wintertime." Merely the Subway in Summer was as as purposeful, ferocious, disdainful and defiant, accelerating every bit if to allow itself jam on its brakes even more than emphatically only moments after. Appearances, and comforts, didn't affair: Equally e'er in New York, in that location were places to get to, work to be done. True, this railroad train, dissimilar Whitman's, belched no pennants of smoke, merely it was "throbbing" and "convulsive" just the aforementioned.
Of class, no one was paying attention; all eyes were glued to cellphones. Miracles oftentimes pass unnoticed; plane passengers ignore the clouds, as well. Simply has annihilation ever glided and so effortlessly beneath a place so dense, and congested? And 120 years after stalwart workers bore through all that schist to blaze the trail?
Griping about the subway is a birthright of a native New Yorker. But to us grateful auslanders it's the subway, more annihilation else, that embodies the freedom we fled to New York to enjoy, the very liberty Whitman celebrates, the liberty to be who you lot want where you want when yous want, untethered to anyone else's tastes or clocks or cars.
A couple of deals earlier dawn, as another poet once wrote, New York's streets belong to the cop and the janitor with the mop. But after pulling yet another of its all-nighters, the subway is what brings that cop and that janitor to work. Let'southward just admit it: The city, or at least near of it, does sleep. It's the subway that never did, at least until Covid came forth. And now, barreling down to Times Square, information technology was springing back to life, 24 hours a day.
I stayed on the train: I had three more leaps, below three more than civilizations, all the same to go. And I got there with time to spare, for when it clicks, the subway makes even procrastinators punctual.
Only Whitman, I imagine, would have alighted at Times Square, "itinerant and lighthearted." As he'd accept heard the conductor say, there were so many more roads to explore: the A, E and C; the N, Q, R and Westward; the shuttle to Thou Fundamental, the seven downstairs, the 1 across the platform. Or maybe he'd just walk upstairs, head over to Bryant Park and write another poem — one celebrating the subway's, and the city'south, render.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/15/nyregion/walt-whitman-subway.html
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