Our Subway, Ourselves: Images Through the Ages
2010 The No. 7 Flushing line at the 40th Street-Lowery Street station in Sunnyside, Queens.
By DAVID W. DUNLAP
Published: October 21, 2010
YOU can smell these photos, can’t you?
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You can hear them. You can feel them. If you’re a New Yorker of a certain age, you can even taste them. (God help us, there were fast-food counters in the Times Square station until a generation ago. )
To mark the subway’s 106th birthday this week, Metropolitan and the Lens blog offer the first extensive gallery of subway pictures by staff photographers of The New York Times. In showing us the subway, they show us ourselves sharing a great underground and elevated common, a leveler of prince and pauper, Bloomberg and Jazzbo, where everyone is entitled — or condemned — to the same experience. There are no business-class subway cars; no wood-paneled IRT Club waiting rooms; no five-star concierge booths for the exclusive use of platinum MetroCard holders.
Nor is it saying anything new to note the democracy of the subway. But these images underscore how much of the city can be read in its mass-transit system.
As the 20th century opened, New York was an industrial crucible, muscular and brutal, but flirting with progressivism and confident of its role at the cutting edge of the new electric technology. By midcentury, the subway was a nickel-a-ride fact of life for generations that had grown up knowing no other way to get around town. In the 1960s and ’70s, the subway became a barometer — safe passage was no longer guaranteed. The troubles and spoliation boiling down below would not be confined there very long.
Then, within sight of the 21st century, the subway bounded back in the flash of stainless steel and the gleam of fresh-scrubbed ceramic. Chang W. Lee’s picture of two young girls playing aboard an N train, taken this month, calls to mind nothing so much as Allyn Baum’s photo of an impromptu family card game aboard a Rockaway shuttle, taken 52 years ago.
You may come away from this photo essay convinced that — for all our differences — we really are all waiting for the same train.
DAVID W. DUNLAP
Pictures of the New York Subway Through the Ages - NYTimes.com
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