"As The Subway Goes Rolling Along" - Trains Magazine
As a true native New Yorker (born at St. Luke's and then living at 114th and Amsterdam) I have to question the seriousness of these allegations.
Most everyone I know in New York uses sardonic humor regarding many, many aspects of New York life. Doesn't mean we don't love, and appreciate, the place. But it also doesn't mean we don't whack that miserable Stoneburner, or complain about high rents and weird real-estate practices, or .. make jokes about the subway being a hole in the ground.
Have you no appreciation of the wonderful tradition of theater/Yiddish wit? The more you insult something, the more you loved it to begin with. And the sense of humor easily tends toward the black...
OF COURSE the MTA has made great strides since the dark days of the 1970s. But I also clearly remember when what was in Soupy Sales's song was instantly recognizable and familiar to subway riders. I thought it was perfectly normal for the ends of the platform to reek of urine, for example. And the God-awful screeching on the IRT West Side line (now 1 line) had to be heard to be believed! (Now fixed, praise the Lord -- but don't try to pretend it wasn't so just for jingoistic purposes... ;-}
I always rode the subway by preference. Going to Columbia (coming in by bus over the Bridge, and I would have taken the IND if it had been extended over) I adjusted my schedule so I could make the loop through South Ferry looking out through the open front window, instead of just getting off at 116th. Almost had my arm taken off one day when my briefcase (still clutched in my hand) wound up inside the closing doors, with me outside and a conductor whose brain was elsewhere. You should have heard the screaming inside the car ... the conductor didn't. Took the following 1 to 96th Street, transferred to the first express, and caught the miscreant a couple of stops down. The conductor actually then had the nerve to ask me how I knew it was my briefcase, and how could I possibly be at his train if I'd missed it!
I do remember fairly frequently being 'accosted' by other riders in a manner that might have turned bad if not handled correctly. My father and I used to go to Ryans and Condons, and I remember him being pushed up against the car door by a belligerent drunk (he had police-surgeon credentials and was carrying at the time; I was proud of him for taking the abuse and not using force). Did this stop me from riding? No. But if you asked me whether I would ride the 2 or 3 north of 96th Street in the '70s? Hell no! We'd be singing 'he never returned, no he never returned' for a VERY different reason. (That ended, conclusively, during the Giuliani years -- I even lived in the South Bronx for a while when going to grad school. But in Mayor Dinky's time? ... or during Abe Beame's little 'time of troubles'? it was kinda hard to be proud of the subway no matter how good the engineering to build it had been, or how much we enjoyed things like riding the old steel cars still being used on the IND. That does not mean we didn't love it in our own way.
RME
