One in 8 Million: Reclaiming My Home

When I was a little girl poking around my father’s coin stash, the stray New York City Subway tokens always intrigued me. I remember the subway: the turnstiles like a bathtub faucet turned upright, a rotating propeller I could slip under easily; anyone could. And I remember the trains, arriving colorful and coated in bright pastel graffiti like as if through some magic tunnel. The bright red cars: the redbirds. The handholds. The window in the first car, my first roller coaster.

Stricken to its placid suburbs, I was drawn into New York City’s magic like an artist with no medium. It was a world for me to finally move about. A new continent I learned by foot, by error and chance. The subway was an extension of “the city”‘s geography, each car a microcosm of the streets above with its spectrum of neighborhoods, sites and smells… street vendors. I loved the collective movement of the riders, like cytoplasm pushing against a membrane. I loved being surrounded, enclosed, treading the undulating waves of the train’s speed.

Yes, now, I carpool with 5 million weekday riders daily on New York City’s subway. I traverse the length and width of the mighty isle of Manhattan and boomerang crosstown and over the East river in a continuum of stand clear of the closing doors, please. On my daily walk east from 96th and Lexington I see piled asphalt and cranes, baffled that under my feet they’re mining a new line (the T). A new 2nd Avenue line, just a couple avenues down (or up) the fierce hill to Lexington. I look at the MTA’s Capital Construction plan, the $337 million plan postponed from 1931, and am baffled. I think New Yorkers can handle a 5 minute walk from Lexington Avenue.