Underground Movements: Modern Culture on the New York City Subway

Conclusion: The Private Subway in the Postmodern City

[ 166 ] CoNCLuSIoN tHe PrIvAte sUbwAY In tHe PostModern CItY • • • • Since the 1950s New York City’s population has fallen and risen; its economy has gone through several cycles of boom and bust. The threat of crime, allied to the subway in the popular imagination from the 1960s onward, was counteracted through aggressive (some say too aggressive) policing in the 1980s and 1990s. Criminologist George Kelling and political scientist James Wilson’s “broken windows theory,” which posits that an environment of apathy toward minor crimes encourages more serious violations, had a major influence on the powers within the New York City Transit Authority and Transit Police. As Robert Huber of the Transit Authority pointed out in 1982, the subway was “under-capitalized from the beginning” (qtd. in Theroux ). The nickel subway fare, the third rail of local politics until mid-century , left the system with a tight budget; as a consequence, maintenance and the purchase of new equipment were deferred as long as possible (Hood, 722 Miles 222). That abdication of responsibility, coupled with a decreasing tax base and a loss of federal funding, led to a deterioration of the system. The era of insolvency and disrepair that followed from the late 1960s [ 167 ] The Private Subway in the Postmodern City through the 1990s seems disconnected from the “golden age” that preceded it (Hood, 722 Miles 214). The same is true of subway stories in this period: dystopian descriptions became extremely common from the 1970s through the 1990s, setting contemporary rides in sharp contrast to the good old days of the modern subway.1 But contemporary writing about the New York subway displays a number of features and attitudes that more closely track with modernist attitudes toward the transit system. Late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century New York writers embrace the subway in ways as varied as did those of the early twentieth century: novelists explore the psychological and historical resonances of the tunnels; poets hear echoes of their predecessors and see their ghosts underground; and playwrights, perhaps inheriting the optimism of Osip Dymov, continue to stage the subway as a melting pot. Throughout these new subway stories, the transit system gives structural coherence to an otherwise chaotic urban space. For contemporary artists and writers, the New York City subway becomes part of what Warren Susman calls the “usable past,” an evocative image that is repeatedly brought into dialogue with new social and historical forces. The subway is a potent symbol for present-day city dwellers, I argue, because it offers continuity through an individual’s history and serves as a shared experience among New Yorkers whose lives seem otherwise irredeemably different from one another. As New York City moves through periods of rapid change, the subway connects its artists and writers with the past, offering a bulwark against what Max Page calls the city’s “creative destruction,” an “urban condition of unstoppable and inscrutable development and redevelopment, destruction and rebuilding with no apparent end” (Creative Destruction of Manhattan 258). This creative destruction is inseparable from the city’s history over the breadth of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first: Richard Le Gallienne muses on “ever-new” New York in the pages of Harper’s Magazine in 1911, while Robert Moses takes it as a mandate in mid-century, and Rem Koolhaas celebrates it in the 1970s. To conclude my investigation of the modernist subway culture, I examine its echoes in the postmodern and postindustrial cultural sphere, especially in the realm of the personal essay. Postmodernist writers, artists, and musicians imagine the subway as a repository for earlier personal history, a kind of underground museum of their memories. The New York subway makes it possible for these technological tale tellers [ 168 ] CONCLUSION to visualize continuity even while the city changes around them: though some lines have changed names and others have disappeared, the basic structural elements of riding the subway remain the same. Like their modernist counterparts, these artists imagine the subway as a technology that mediates between individual memory and the impersonal city. Indeed, the subway can be understood as a technology that intercedes between people and the things they have built that have expanded beyond a human scale: the automobile, the elevator, and the Internet browser all serve a similar purpose. Subway stories remind us that technologies of mobility neither fully control nor are controlled by their passengers. Instead, they highlight certain ways of...