Subway Story (review)

"When Jessie was born in St. Louis, Missouri, she weighed 75,122 pounds and was 51 1/2 feet long." About average, one would suspect, for a subway car. In her heyday, she shuttled visitors to the New York World's Fair, transported commuters to their destinations, and mightily enjoyed the curves and drops that guided her along the tracks and under the river. Repairs and paint jobs kept her going for over two decades, but time took its toll, and she was successively put out to pasture in a train yard, stripped of her parts, hauled away on a barge, and dumped off the Atlantic coast, where sea life transformed her, "and now a whole city lives inside her." The anthropomorphized car, with its cheery eyes and grinning grill, is designed to win the hearts of a quite young audience as it whooshes through hazily softened swaths of NYC. It may come as something of a shock, therefore, when the peppy tale of a helpful rail car takes an abruptly darker turn. An endnote offers some explanation about Jessie's fate: "After they were taken out of service, many of the Redbirds [subway cars] were reused as artificial reefs in the Atlantic" and speaks of the reefs' role in providing "new fishing grounds for both people and fish." Hopefully an ecologically minded adult will talk up Jessie's ongoing contribution to the maritime community; otherwise kids who rely on the text alone will probably conclude humanity done her wrong.