By Vivian J. Willinger
Posted: July 2, 2025
As the old song (1) said:
“New York, New York, it’s a wonderful town!
The Bronx is up, the Battery is down,
The people travel in a hole in the ground.
New York, New York, it’s a wonderful town!”
That “hole in the ground” was the subway. For a nickel, once upon a time - later, for a dime, a quarter, and then, more expensive tokens and bar-coded cards - I could go anywhere in the city. From the outer reaches of the Bronx, the subway was my speedy commute to work in Manhattan. It was also my escape route to Fifth Avenue department stores, Madison Avenue boutiques, museums of art and natural history, Central Park with its ice-skating rink and Sheep Meadow, picture palaces like Radio City Music Hall and the Roxy, theaters on and off Broadway, districts specializing in everything: men’s and women’s clothing, sewing supplies, mechanical tools, books, wholesale furniture, household appliances, dinnerware, silverware, jewelry, diamonds.
Diamonds and the subway came together for my family when I was about five years old. Seated between my parents as the subway lurched away from the station, something poked my bottom. I yelped and squirmed off the seat. There, stuck between the horizontal and vertical sections of my seat, was a little purse with two protruding knobs. My mother opened the purse: inside were two rings – a solitaire-diamond engagement ring and a wedding band studded with diamond baguettes! My father murmured something about the Lost and Found Office; my mother, putting the diamond rings on her finger, said, “If they were lost, now they’re found.” She wore those rings for the rest of her life.
The rest of my family’s life with the subway was not so magical. We lived in a six-story apartment building very close to an elevated part of the subway system. Whenever a train went by, its roaring sound rolled through our apartment. I learned to stop and restart my conversations in sync with the passing subways. Rapid transit but slow talk. During rush hours when the subways rumbled by every few minutes, I simply shut up.
Noisy, that was the subway. And grimy, too - the dull brown-gray, gray-brown color of old subway cars is still my avatar of deep-down dirtiness. But there were bright colors inside the subway cars. Take the seats: first, they were canary-yellow wicker; then, tomato-red leatherette; and finally, lime-green molded plastic. Take a seat, if you could find an empty one. I remember my father telling me to stand in front of a “colored” person during rush hour because he or she was likely to get off at 125th Street, the heart of Harlem, many stops before my home in the Bronx. It was racial segregation, New York style.
Ethnic segregation also rode the subway. Among the ads above the seats, there was always an effervescent, ever-blonde Miss Rheingold, posing with a bottle of New York’s favorite beer. The ads hawking cigarettes also had their blondes blithely puffing away. But the pictures of Miss Subways, with a different New York City girl chosen each month, hardly ever showed a WASP-y blonde - locally, at least, dark-haired Italians and Jews trumped Blondie.
For all of us, there was subway etiquette. We never spoke to a stranger, no matter how nearby. We did not take the pushing and shoving and body sandwiching of rush hour personally, unless groped; then, yelling and calling out the pervert was fine. We never looked anyone in the eye. We might furtively peer over the edge of a folded-in-half newspaper, but never let our gaze rest on anyone. Because then, etiquette could fly out of the subway faster than a cockroach fleeing the light.
I once broke the “do not look” rule because a young man on the other side of the subway car was so incredibly good-looking. I was sitting next to the subway door and when he walked over to it, I thought he was going to get off the train. He got off all right, giving me an incredibly close look at his penis, flashed exactly at my eye level, before he dashed out the opened door. Not such a wonderful town, sometimes.
If getting out of a subway train could lead to the unexpected, so could getting into a train. One time, I was in the Times Square station with an especially heavy rush hour crowd and lost my balance as people surged around me into the subway car. My right leg wound up wedged between the platform and the open door of the car. I could not raise myself up and people continued cramming into the car as if I were not there. I was about to scream for help when two men, one on each side of me, lifted me up and pushed me into the car. It was not chivalry; it was simply two guys determined to barrel their way in; two guys who were not going to let anyone or anything stand in the way of catching their train. Not for a New York minute!
Another time, as I exited the Port Authority station, I felt a nudge and looked over to see a very well-dressed man with his hand inside my opened handbag. I looked at this would-be pickpocket, first with surprise and then, with growing fury. Not a word was said; our eyes stayed locked on each other, and the moment seemed to go on and on. Then, he withdrew his hand, without taking anything, and disappeared into the crowd. If looks could kill … Well, here, my enraged look stopped a crime.
If I could see Mr. Natty Pickpocket clearly, the time came when I could not see anything clearly in the subway. Graffiti had settled over the subways like a blanket of snow, except it was neither white nor lovely. Slushy big black-lettered “tags” covered the windows. Day-Glo painted slogans stretched across the outside of the cars. Strange Magic Marker scribbles defaced the station walls and pillars. I had to snatch a look out an opened subway door to know which station I was at. It was “Decline-and-Fall” time in New York City.
The subways were no longer safe. Transit cops began to patrol the subway cars. The cars began to resemble garbage cans on wheels. They had never been models of cleanliness but now they rivaled the Augean Stables (2). Shredded newspapers littered the floors of the cars. Raggedy homeless people and the mentally ill - some comatose, others in full rant - occupied the far ends of the cars. A less than fragrant aroma filled the air of the cars. Rancid fast-food leftovers were left on the seats. Strange gooey substances found their way onto all surfaces of the cars. Hell, forget garbage cans on wheels; it was simply, completely, hell on wheels.
One morning, I had to go to Jamaica, Queens and had to transfer to three different subway lines to get there. All three subways were in similar states of disarray and disgustingness. It was three times as much mess as I was used to trying to ignore. When I got to my destination stop, I realized I had reached another kind of stop: I did not have to put up with this; there were other ways to live; other places to live.
I moved to Arizona where the only Subways are sandwich shops. Nicer and cleaner than the New York subways, for sure. But not the stuff memories are made of.
References:
- “Song from the movie “On the Town”. "New York, New York (On The Town)", composed by Leonard Bernstein with lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. It celebrates the energy and excitement of New York City and was performed by Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and Jules Munshin in the movie.” Google AI
- The term "Augean stables" refers to a situation or place that is extremely dirty, corrupt, or difficult to clean, drawing from the Greek myth of Hercules' fifth labor. Hercules was tasked with cleaning the stables of King Augeas, which had not been cleaned for 30 years and housed a massive number of cattle. The task was so immense that it became a metaphor for any incredibly difficult and unpleasant job. Google AI
