The Urban Underground

Observations from chance arrivals on the New York Metro

When I clutched my camera and entered into the train car of a Metro train headed downtown from 103 Street, I felt like a tourist. I was in the city for only a weekend with a friend but I was on a mission to find something I was not yet sure of. I had only ridden this train a few time before and being from out of town I felt out of place. The train made it next stop, the train emptied and refilled, twice, three times I got off. I didn’t have a destination in mind, only that I got off once every three stops and photograph until the next train came and I would get back on and repeat the process.

Infrastructure has always fascinated me, but particularly subways systems holds more intrigue. These underground tunnels and the vehicles that lived in them ships around hundreds of thousands of people per day. It is a strange experience to sit in a station and think about how such things are built.

These stations are merely transitions from one persons life to the next. It isn’t just a physical movement, but an emotional one as well. Home transitions to work which transitions to a bar perhaps. Or, if you are from out of town, a hotel transitions to a museum or a restaurant or a site to behold in person for the very first time.

Each time getting on and off various trains I couldn’t help but notice how different each station was. I noticed it at first stepping off onto the 81st Street platform which was also the stop for the Museum of Natural History. The tile work was intricate, the hum of conversation was only dampened slightly by the screech of the trains. It was well kept. This was the impression the city wanted to make on those who would remember only mere hours of a trip once they returned home to anywhere else. A train pulled up again and I waited for my next stop. Seventy-Second, Fifty-Nine, Fifty-Three, I stepped out of the car. This place was no 81st street. It was darker here than at the last one, and it was eerily quiet. Only echoes from trains off in the distance filled the station.

Still, there was life. The lives that moved through this station did not belong to the weekenders and tourists. This station transitioned the people who lived and worked here. I wondered what it was like. What did it feel like to live here? To see this station, without the affection that tourists felt about 81st street. To see it unkept but also unapologetic. I may never know this but I paused for a while.

I wondered what could be above me that a stop could be so quiet in comparison to my last destination. I decided to find out.