The past couple of days started me thinking about a major part of my city; one that is usually either ignored or otherwise overlooked as the standard part of life in NY. The subway is one of our oldest structures and, in my opinion, one of the most telling.
I wrote an entry about this before, in this post about 9/11 and the Cortlandt Street station in the Financial District. The station, until recently, always looked frozen in time once the debris were cleared out.
Until now. The Manhattan-bound service has finally been restored to Cortlandt Street.
Truthfully, while I’m glad, I would’ve much rather kept the station as a perennial, permanent ghost. As our stations now are getting updated – the BMT line closed down several stations to renovate them – it feels as though parts of the city’s oldest history are getting lost. History is not always in a museum and, although the Transit Museum is an amazing thing, the history of the subway is something best witnessed in action.
For example, the A/C/G station of Hoyt-Schermerhorn. First of all, its layout is ridiculous; if you take the Queens-bound G crosstown, across the platform is the Manhattan-bound A. Logic normally dictates that in a transfer station, the train across the platform heads into the same direction. Four directions, four tracks, laid out in a pattern that’s decipherable only by the white-on-black signs written in Arial bold that designate which line going where stops at what track.
In trying to decipher the direction, the average commuter doesn’t generally pay attention to the far platforms of the station. Just beyond the A/C track is another platform, another set of tracks, neither of which was used since the 1970s at the very least. In contrast to the ever-busy, milling-with-people transfer point, these two platforms are completely frozen in time. You don’t ask when those stations quit being used. You just know that they no longer are.
Similar thing with the old subway tunnels that are now either being renovated to be put back into service or serve already as an auxiliary set of tracks for weekend express service changes – rare though it is to have an express train on the weekends. If you’re on the F line and the service is changed for express from Church Avenue to Jay Street, likely the train wilol take the express tunnel. Sharp eyes who watched Rent may be able to peg the F-line Church Avenue station as where certain scenes were filmed, but likely, they won’t think about the abandoned service platform that’s somewhere between Ft. Hamilton Parkway and Prospect Park. There’s something similar underneath the Bergen Street stop as well.
It’s been some years since I’ve been rerouted into the tunnel, but there’s something about seeing aged painting supplies, ladders, poorly lit stairwells going towards the ground that resonates with me. And all of that to me says, this is history. This is New York’s underground history that people don’t think about, because they may never have a reason to.
Think about it. NYC’s subway system is a century old. That’s a hundred years of changes, additions, alterations, but all you see now is the current result. The new R160 train models with the automated announcements are definitely miles above the 1950s train car with a pastel-blue paint job and happy smiling advertisements of household products that is now parked in the Transit Museum. Stations are being renovated left and right – eventually, only archives will tell you what train line ran along an abandoned platform in a busy station setting.
History is everywhere – especially if you don’t see it at first.
