Underground Movements: Modern Culture on the New York City Subway

1. Forming the Subway Habit

[ 24 ] ChAPter 1 ForMIng tHe sUbwAY HAbIt • • • • Before the subway opened, New York’s newspapers took sides on the issue, sensing that it would come to define the city in a new way. Some touted the possibility of traveling from City Hall to Harlem in fifteen minutes. Joseph Pulitzer’s New York Evening World made the claim a battle cry of its own, calling it on April 5, 1893, “the definition of the term ‘Real Rapid Transit’” and repeatedly invoking it in editorials and features about subway construction (“To Harlem in Fifteen Minutes”).1 Other publications, like the New York Sun, concerned themselves with safety issues (“How We’ll Travel in the Subway”). Elmer Davis, the first writer to chronicle the history of the New York Times, jokingly granted that the Sun “was brilliantly written ” but declared that its literary pretensions notwithstanding, the paper’s “energies were principally devoted to the contentions that New Yorkers could never be persuaded to ride in subway trains” (197). The editors of the New York Times, by contrast, knew that New Yorkers could be persuaded to ride in subway trains. They began their campaign early, promoting a vision [ 25 ] Forming the Subway Habit of underground space that was neither dangerous nor particularly modern. Instead, the paper made a concerted effort to cultivate the subway habit. After he bought the Times in 1897, publisher Adolph Ochs positioned it as the sober alternative to activist journalism. Under Ochs’s ownership the Times became the paper that we know today, the one that gives its readers “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” When it came to the subway, the Times took an uncharacteristically speculative approach: along with its coverage of the business of subway construction, the paper imagined how that transit technology would affect the thought processes of both New Yorkers and tourists.2 Consider “The Subway Habit,” an editorial published on October 4, 1903, more than a year before the subway would open to the public. The article anticipates subway travel becoming routine, asserting that “for some hundreds of thousands of people it will be a convenience so great that they will immediately acquire the habit of using it.” It describes how the prototypical passenger will learn to navigate his underground commute: “He will presently become expert in distinguishing each station by its distinctive color scheme, and will probably recognize intuitively when he nears his own stopping place without looking up from his paper.” It lightly mocks the middle-class mania for efficiency with a quotation from Shakespeare: “To his self-congratulation when the savings of time over present methods of transit is first experienced, and until he becomes again impatient of delay, the only appropriate reply would be that of Hamlet to the peripatetic ghost: ‘Well said, old mole. Canst work i’ the earth so fast?’” And it imagines that the underground movement between highly segmented spaces might provincialize New York’s citizens, worrying that the passenger’s “underground flight night and morning will serve to transplant him from one small and familiar neighborhood surrounding his place of business to another equally small and familiar neighborhood surrounding his home. Of the crowded square miles lying between he will learn nothing and may gradually forget what he has known.” “The Subway Habit” and articles like it imagine subway passengers’ daily routines as a starting point for considering how they will perceive the city from this new, technologically mediated position. Although the writers assume that the technology will play an overall positive role, they express the dissatisfactions inherent to modernity, such as the fear that any convenience gained by speeding up is immediately lost as the new speed becomes routine. Indeed, one of the strangest things about underground movement was [ 26 ] CHAPTER ONE the pace at which it became absolutely unremarkable. For an earlier example of this acclimation we might look to the railroad, which, as Benson Bobrick argues, enabled “people to reconcile themselves to living in the Underworld” (85). This is true both because the railroad commonly ran through long tunnels, seeming effectively to be underground, and because its smoke, soot, and fire made it appear to be an infernal machine. Yet people did not reconcile themselves to living in this underworld; they reconciled themselves to moving through it. “The Subway Habit” and later stories of subway movement reveal a fascination with this subterranean space not because people dwell underground but because...