The Subway: New York’s Mirror

For over ten years, I’ve been regularly taking the subway from the Upper East Side to Grand Central Station to get to work at the Axel Springer office on 5th Avenue. It’s the best and most sensible way to get around in New York City because the streets of Manhattan are so clogged that taking a taxi or even trying to find a free “Yellow Cab” can become a nightmare. Plus, the subway is cheaper, of course.

No wonder then that everyone from dish washers to stockbrokers descend to the shafts beneath the skyscrapers almost every day in order to pack themselves, sardine-like, into subway cars.

During my first few months in New York, I had an almost romantic or adventuresome vision of the subway. I knew about the T-shirts that bragged “I survived the subway.” Those came from the era when the subway was decorated (desecrated?) with graffiti and when many people were afraid to go “underground” after 8:00 PM.

Later, a bit of disenchantment set in. Above all during rush hours (7-9 AM and 5-8 PM) I experienced empty stares, anonymity, and even occasional hostility. All signs of a difficult fight for survival in the city that never sleeps and in which pursuing the dollar was everything.

The New York Times did a study of subway passengers. It chose the Q-line that runs from Brooklyn to Manhattan, one of the typical commuter trains. It was chosen because most people who work in Manhattan live in more reasonable priced boroughs such as Queens, the Bronx, Harlem or Brooklyn. That’s why the Q-line is such a wonderful mirror for normal citizens of the mega-city New York.

8:27 Thursday morning at DeKalb Avenue in Brooklyn: “Closing doors. Attention please,” came the loudspeaker announcement. A short jolt and the train started.

128 people jammed together in the car, 99 of them willing to be photographed and interviewed. Four passengers are asleep, eight have isolated themselves from their surroundings with their iPods. The remainder irritably decline to be interviewed.

· Oldest passenger: 69

· Youngest passenger: 3

· Shortest residency in New York: 1 week

· Longest residency in New York: 69 years

· Professionals: 73

· Most common professions: Student (6) Architect (4)

· Other professions: lawyer, physician, clerk, fitness trainer, designer, trainee, secretary, computer programmer, cleaning lady, sports shoe salesman, psychologist, banker, financial analyst, journalist . . .

· People born in New York: 34

· Other birthplaces: Elsewhere in the USA, Russia, Barbados, Trinidad/Tobago, Columbia, England, Ukraine, Ecuador, Haiti, China, France, Guatemala, Australia, Grenada, Bangladesh, Japan, Turkey, India, the Dominican Republic, Spain, Jamaica, Nigeria. (No Germans, but that’s surely a fluke.)

People and their stories:

Nadia Gavrylchenko (30) from Russia. She came to the USA with her family at the age of ten. She married a Ukrainian, has a son (6) and takes the subway daily to her job as an office manager. “I tried living elsewhere, but New York is and always will be home.”

Susan Gross (33) native New Yorker and a divorce lawyer. “I’m not a New Yorker, I’m a Brooklynite. Life in the boroughs is so diverse you have to identify where you’re from.” She’s right there . . . Manhattan, for example, has mutated into an exclusive island for millionaires.

Carla Cravens (32) from Dallas, a New York resident for one month, is an interior designer. “In Texas, you have to drive long distances and the real estate prices are insanely high. It made sense to move to New York. I love the city life. No car, and I found a job immediately.”

Nathaniel Long (30) is from Ohio, works in online sales and is a freelance author. He’s studying journalism, but there were no jobs in Ohio. That’s why he came to New York working nights at his passion, reporting on the Hip-Hop scene in Brooklyn.

Arber Camargo (37), an engineer from Colombia came to the United States and New York five years ago. “I had family members already here. New York is good to me. I won’t go back to Colombia.”

After I had read these stories, I saw a report in the New York Post about the most hated baseball player in New York: John Rocker, ex-star of the Boston Red Sox, the Yankees’ arch enemy.

Rocker became the most hated sports figure in New York after he described subway passengers as follows: “. . . some kid with purple hair next to some queer with AIDS right next to some dude who just got out of jail for the fourth time right next to some 20-year-old mom with four kids.”

Maybe he should try riding the subway himself first.

Punk.