Don’t Take the Train

During winters, I would take the F train to school and over summer I would ride it to Coney Island until I could tell which subway station I was approaching by the color of the wall tiles. I would take a breath as the subway train left the dark tunnels, rails sparking and the lights occasionally flickering out, to ascend to the ‘high line’ overlooking McDonald Avenue.

Coney Island-Stillwell Av was the last stop if it was summer or I was playing hooky on a winter beach day. It was also the last stop for Debrina Kawam, a homeless woman, who was sleeping on the train when she was set on fire by a Guatemalan migrant on her last Sunday morning.

Kawam had likely been avoiding the homeless shelters after they were overrun with violent migrants, but it did her no good. The last we saw of her, she was standing and burning, while people walked by or filmed with their phones at the last stop in view of the cold seaside air.

The murder on the F train took place weeks after Daniel Penny, a Marine Corps veteran, had been ‘let off’ after heroically intervening to stop a career maniac, who previously assaulted a number of elderly women with no consequences, restraining him on a Brooklyn bound F train.

The F train is no worse than any other subway line, traveling from Jamaica, Queens to Coney Island, letting you go from JFK Airport right to the beach (or the other way around) but it is the second longest subway route after the A train made famous by Duke Ellington. The F train did not exist yet and in any case ducks out via Roosevelt Island to Queens long before it reaches Harlem or Ellington’s home in Washington Heights which was then reachable by the A train.

The 27 mile length of the route makes the F train a magnet for homeless, scam artists, subway performers and assorted crazies who know that they can enjoy a ride of over an hour and a half (on a good day) with scenic views, three boroughs and a selection of comfortable seats, if you like orange and yellow buckets, with room to stretch out your feet from a window seat.

There was a time when subway personnel walked through the cars, warning anyone putting their feet up, but these days they have far bigger problems, not just old-fashioned pickpockets and muggers, but random stabbings, serial sexual predators who go in and out of the system, and crazies who push waiting riders onto the tracks when they get too close to the yellow line.

On New Year’s Eve, a man was pushed in front of a subway train. He somehow survived the experience with a broken skull. Subway stabbings have become so routine that there were two on New Year’s Day within 20 minutes. The next day an MTA employee was stabbed in the armpit. The only thing still distinguishing today’s subways from the worst days of the seventies and eighties is the lack of car-to-car graffiti that had become typical in that area.

The subway was always a metaphor for New York City. Its trains rushing between the depths of tunnels and the heights overlooking busy streets linked a bewildering city into one whole. Over a hundred years ago, Joyce Kilmer sketched the subway as a collection of “tired clerks, pale girls, street cleaners, business men, boys, priests and harlots, drunkards, students, thieves” thundering “through the dark”, but the balance of power has shifted away from the clerks, girls, boys and business men, over to the drunkards, thieves, along with the killers and the monsters.

The trouble with the subway, as with the city, is that some take it to go somewhere else, while others use it to take advantage of others. Overrun by criminals, homeless and migrants, the subway is no longer a transportation system, but a colony with a permanent population who form a gauntlet that the rest of us have to run in order to get to anywhere else in the city.

Measures like congestion pricing squeeze more people into a violent and dangerous system, but what makes it violent and dangerous is that it all too well reflects a fallen city. The fundamental difference between the city and all other forms of living is density. In towns and villages, the proportion of private space to public space is weighted toward the individual, but cities are all collective public spaces with a few small stacked private spaces in which we live.

Cities are built by utopians but populated by dystopias. The difference lies in the society. Unlike less dense communities, cities offer little refuge or escape from public spaces into private ones. New York City’s apartments are small even at their most expansive price points and the amount of single family housing continues to drop even assuming that anyone could afford a home.

A social breakdown in a city is felt immediately. When I returned during the pandemic, I could feel the changes in the tension in the air that told me nowhere in the city was safe anymore.

The subway, at its best a means of connecting the city’s varied neighborhoods that is unrivaled in the country and perhaps the world (although Londoners and Parisians may disagree) is wonderful for rapidly navigating the city’s cultural circulatory system, but when a society is poisoned, that same system just as rapidly spreads the poison everywhere that it can reach.

The New York City subway is why Los Angeles and other cities long resisted rapid public transportation, not just because of the cost, but to keep the bad elements from spreading. While other cities can gate off the worst of the problem, retreat to the suburbs and hope that tolls and the cost of car ownership can keep roaming maniacs at bay, there is no such defense here.

Like a heroin shot to the veins, whatever is in the city hits its subways first. Drugs, violence, terror, pain and fear travel along the lines. They roam the byzantine interiors of stations left over from the convoluted merging of the city’s different systems, they live in them and kill in them. The subway is a metaphor for the city. And the city is very, very sick.

If you doubt that, take the A train or the F train. Just listen, look and watch your back.

Source: http://www.danielgreenfield.org/feeds/5119376175182668867/comments/default