Entries tagged with “subway” from Patell and Waterman's History of New York
The posters all over town for the upcoming Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (note the 2009 version uses the numerals rather than the orignal's spelled-out numbers) had Stephanie and me itching to watch the original, which we did the other night. Well worth returning to, though we hope it doesn't deflate the remake too much.So much of the film seemed like a time capsule from the mid-70s, even though (as NYMag notes this week) the mayor's office mandated that the train used in the original be free of the era's ubiquitous subway graffiti. The contents of the time capsule, then? It would include the characters' obsessions with things like women joining the police force or transit union, the now-defunct names of transit companies, the assumption by Matthau's character that visiting Japanese transit officials wouldn't speak a word of English, and above all the array of New York accents.
Whatever happened to the New York accent -- or even to New York accents in the plural? It's possible to live in downtown Manhattan and go for days without talking to someone who speaks like a native New Yorker. You'll hear them in mom and pop shops, or in places like post offices or public schools. But it's not too much a stretch to imagine the old New York accents -- which began to be noticed by observers and represented in print in the late 19th century -- will soon be a thing of the past, thanks mostly to the homogenizing force of global capitalism.
Clearly, the filmmakers in 1974 aimed to make the train hostages a cross-section of New York types, one or two of each, almost like animals chosen for salvation on Noah's Ark. When the film ended and the credits rolled, we saw that the characters had, in fact, been named for the types they were supposed to represent. The list, in part, taken from IMDB:
Anna Berger ... The Mother Gary Bolling ... The Homosexual Carol Cole ... The Secretary Alex Colon ... The Delivery Boy Joe Fields ... The Salesman Mari Gorman ... The Hooker Michael Gorrin ... The Old Man Thomas La Fleur ... The Older Son María Landa ... The Spanish Woman (as Maria Landa) Louise Larabee ... The Alcoholic George Lee Miles ... The Pimp Carolyn Nelson ... Coed #1 Eric O'Hanian ... The Younger Son Lucy Saroyan ... Coed #2 William Snickowski ... The Hippie Barry Snyder ... The W.A.S.P.
A collection of social types, professions, ethnic stereotypes. The old man was an old Jewish man, I think, though he's not listed this way. The Pimp, who was black, might have been listed as the Veteran, since he mentions his service record, and at one point one of the hijackers calls him by the N-word before cracking him across the face with a machine gun, but I suppose they didn't want to type him by the N-word in the credits. It took me a second to figure out what one of the passengers had been The Homosexual. I'll be interested to see what comparable types turn up in the new version. Will the 6 train in 2009 be similarly depicted as a cross-section of the city? If so, how will the writers and directors imagine our social divisions?
Yesterday on The Great Whatsit my friend Tim mentioned a George Carlin record, Occupation: Foole!, which he picked up in a dollar bin. It was recorded in California in 1973, making it roughly the film's contemporary. One of the tracks is called "New York Voices." Who would have thought, at the time, that either it or the original Pelham would wind up serving a documentary function?
Sunday some friends and I donned sensible shoes, grabbed flashlights, and headed to the Trader Joe's at Atlantic and Court in Brooklyn, where we stood in line in the rain waiting to climb down a manhole and enter the world's oldest subway tunnel, which remained hidden from New Yorkers for over a century.
Down we go!
The half-mile long tunnel was built by Cornelius Vanderbilt in 1844 as part of the Long Island Railroad. The idea was to get the train off the downtown streets, where accidents were apparently too common as locomotives chugged to and from the waterfront. The tunnel remained in operation until 1861, when developers had the bright idea that sealing it off and removing train traffic from the area would raise property values, a plan that backfired when commerce shriveled up along with the thoroughfare.
Among the old timers who complained about the travesty being wrought by this would-be wave of gentrification was, believe it or not, Walt Whitman, who wrote about the tunnel in his "Brooklyniana" column for the Brooklyn Standard. Like most Brooklynites, he believed incorrectly that the tunnel had actually been filled in; he lamented the passing of the polyglot culture that had sprung up around the train tracks as engines plunged into the tunnel:We were along there a few days since, and could not help stopping, and giving the reins for a few moments to an imagination of the period when the daily eastern train, with a long string of cars, filled with summer passengers, was about starting for Greenport, after touching at all the intermediate villages and depots. We are (or fancy will have it so) in that train of cars, ready to start. The bell rings, and winds off with that sort of a twirl or gulp (if you can imagine a bell gulping) which expresses the last call, and no more afterwards; then off we go. Every person attached to the road jumps on from the ground or some of the various platforms, after the train starts -- which (so imitative an animal is man) sets a fine example for greenhorns or careless people at some future time to fix themselves off with broken legs or perhaps mangled bodies. The orange women, the newsboys, and the limping young man with long-lived cakes, look in at the windows with an expression that says very plainly, "We'll run along-side, and risk all danger, while you find the change." The smoke with a greasy smell comes drifting along, and you whisk into the tunnel.
Our tour was led by Bob Diamond, the president of the Brooklyn Historic Rail Association, who discovered the tunnel's location around 1980, when he was not quite 20 years old. Between the 1860s and 1980, the tunnel had been a thing of legend: The Times printed a "romance" about pirates living in the tunnel in the 1890s; H.P. Lovecraft wrote about "Persian vampires" roosting there in his story "The Horrors of Red Hook"; German saboteurs were feared to be plotting enormous explosions there during WWI; bootleggers were supposed to be distilling there; and an old-fashioned engine was supposed to be sealed in somewhere, possibly containing the missing pages of John Wilkes Booth's diary. Authorities believed the tunnel no longer existed, but Diamond persisted, scouring maps in the public library and hounding city officials and local historians until he located a small crawl space under the Atlantic Ave manhole cover and convinced the gas company to help him check it out. The gas folks, seeing that the hole appeared to be filled, were ready to bag the effort, but Bob climbed inside and crawled on his stomach below the street for several feet until he hit a dead end. He removed enough dirt with his bare hands to realize he'd found a brick wall, which he eventually knocked a hole through big enough to poke his head inside and see that he'd finally found the tunnel. Here he is describing the tunnel's construction:
And here's another quick video produced, apparently, by tunnel enthusiasts:
Diamond gives tours a couple times a year; judging from the turnout Sunday they're fairly popular. According to his website, the next one's scheduled for June 28. He has a lively style, a pocket full of entertaining anecdotes, a thorough-going knowledge of the area's geology and history, and a sense of adventure that doesn't appear to have diminished in the last 30 years. Highly recommended for folks who like a taste of the underground now and again.
The tunnel's been thoroughly blogged elsewhere, including Forgotten NY. For a bunch of better photos than mine, check out these sites.
If you, too, missed the ride, you can still catch -- in addition to LC's account and a more humorous one by East Village Idiot -- a bonus video of the working ceiling fan, spinning just inches above straphangers' heads. Reminds me of the spinning shadows in the subway scenes from Pickup on South Street (1953). When I first saw that film I thought the subway ceiling fans were somehow a production goof introduced via a fake subway car set!
Photo from stationstops.com
Among the best things people can say about the new terminal are that a) it's clean -- though some say "sterile," like an Apple store; b) it will shave approximately six minutes off the full 7th Avenue commute (for those Staten Islanders who work at 242nd Street); and c) it's ADA-compliant. The last is certainly something to appreciate.
Among the old treasures that will be lost to the public, though, are the fifteen ornate Heins and LaFarge ceramic plaques depicting a sloop in the harbor:
The old station will apparently be used to store extra trains to dispatch during rush hour. I imagine it will become a destination for those who scheme for peeks at the forbidden NYC underground -- the way the old City Hall station is now.
What's been less discussed in the hubbub over the new terminal are the things uncovered during excavation. The MTA's own site has a useful overview, and the rhetoric, at least, is friendly to archaeology and history, unusual for NYC construction projects.
The most major find during the dig, back in the fall of 2005, was a major chunk of the old Battery Wall, a colonial era bulwark that ringed the lower tip of the Island. From the MTA site:
[T]he battery would have had cannon mounted along it to fire at enemy ships. Four different sections of the battery wall have been found, spanning a distance of almost 600 feet. It ranges from about 8 to 10 feet wide. The largest section is about 75 feet long and up to four feet high, although it would have been much higher when it was built.The version of the Battery Wall unearthed during construction probably dates to the middle of the eighteenth century and would have been built before the Revolutionary War and was partially demolished and buried when the area was filled in the early nineteenth century to create Battery Park.
The Battery was, at least during the post-Revolutionary years, a popular promenade. After the war, barracks that had housed British troops during the occupation were pulled down, elm trees were planted, and the walk from the Bowling Green to the Battery was transformed into "one of the most delightful walks, perhaps in the world," according to one city newspaper.
Anyone who's read Royall Tyler's 1787 play The Contrast, celebrated as the first play by an American playwright to be staged by professional actors, will recall that it opens with one of the leads, the coquettish Charlotte, recounting for a friend the previous night's walk on the Battery:
It would have delighted you to have seen meHer friend stops her, scandalized: "Fie, fie, Charlotte! I protest you are quite a libertine!"
the last evening, my charming girl! I was dangling
o'er the battery with Billy Dimple; a knot of young
fellows were upon the platform; as I passed them I
faultered with one of the most bewitching false steps
you ever saw, and then recovered myself with such a
pretty confusion, flirting my hoop to discover a jet
black shoe and brilliant buckle. Gad! how my little
heart thrilled to hear the confused raptures of--
"Demme, Jack, what a delicate foot!" "Ha! Gen-
eral, what a well-turned--"
Portions of the newly-discovered Battery have been preserved in the mezzanine wall of the new station.
What else has turned up at the old Battery? Pottery shards, bones, over-sized oyster shells, and yellow bricks used in Dutch construction. One fun find is a "counter," or non-negotiable coin, commemorating the 1758 British capture of the French Fortress of Louisbourg in Nova Scotia.But it's hard not to think about what will be lost, especially when you compare the old signage with the new:
Could they at least photograph the old station lettering, the way they're apparently doing at some stops in Brooklyn?
Yesterday's New York Times article about the Q train (and Bryan's post about it) reminded me of a famous comment made some eight years ago about the diversity of the ridership on New York's subways, in this case the 7 train.
The comment is a perfect illustration of Thomas Bender's point in the essay "New York as a Center of Difference" (from The Unfinished City [2007]) that New York's "historic cosmopolitanism" puts it odds with the cultural mythologies that have dominated Americans' understanding of what it means to be American. Bender identifies these as Puritanism and Jeffersonian agrarian and argues that neither can give positive cultural or political value to heterogeneity or conflict. Each in its own way is xenophobic, and that distances both of them from the conditions of modern life."
The comment is also a good illustration of the mindset that Thomas Frank describes in his study of contemporary U.S. conservatism, What's the Matter with Kansas (2004): "People in suburban Kansas City vituperate against the sinful cosmopolitan elite of New York and Washington, D.C.; people in rural Kansas vituperate against the sinful cosmopolitan elite of Topeka and suburban Kansas City."
The comment was made by major-league pitcher John Rocker, a native of Georgia, and (at the time) the closer for the Atlanta Braves. In an interview, Rocker told Sports Illustrated in the spring of 2000 that New York is "the most hectic, nerve-racking city. Imagine having to take the 7 Train to the ballpark, looking like you're riding through Beirut next to some kid with purple hair, next to some queer with AIDS, right next to some dude who just got out of jail for the fourth time, right next to some 20-year-old mom with four kids. It's depressing."
Rocker's views may well have represented the views held by a fair number of Americans about their fellow citizens in New York. Indeed, one salon.com writer wondered whether Rocker "merely an expression of the national id whose blurted-out comments represent the sinister opinions secretly held by all the rest of us?" Nevertheless, Rocker's comments were deemed offensive not only by New Yorkers, but also by Major League Baseball, which suspended Rocker for the rest of spring training and the first 28 games of the season (though the punishment was reduced on appeal to merely the first 14 games of the season).
Rocker never really lived down the controversy and (perhaps by coincidence) his pitching performance declined thereafter. By 2003, he was no longer playing major-league ball. Last year, he was implicated as a steroid user during an investigation into an Atlanta steroid ring.
You can learn more about Rocker's views (and order a "Speak English" T-shirt) from his website, http://www.johnrocker.net.
I was reminded by the piece of a late-eighteenth-century account of travel by stage from New York to New Haven. It comes from the diary of a 25-year-old NYC physician and poet named Elihu Hubbard Smith, a central figure in my book Republic of Intellect. Here's his take on his fellow passengers, 29 November 1795, just following New York's yellow fever epidemic that year:
We were six, beside the driver: an old, greasy, gouty, lecherous Jew; a huge Irish manufacturer of Fleecy Hosiery; a South Carolina merchant; a middle-aged, decent Frenchman; a young mercantile Hamburger who spoke French & English; & myself. The Israelite was for fun and singing; but no one sung. He & the Irishman discust politics & The Fever. The Frenchman & the German, first fell on the French Emigrants, next on the Fever--& lastly upon this country. All these topics they handled, with prodigious volubility, in French. The Carolina growled a little, & muttered something on merchandise: I was silent. . . . A rambling talk, on religion, at Supper, gave opportunity to all the guests to discover their infidelity; & the Hebrew, in particular, disclaimed Moses & the prophets; & emphatically pronounced this sentence, that--'from Genesis to Revelations, all is trumpery.'The Times article makes a point that 8 passengers with iPods refused to be interviewed, raising the well-worn specter that headphones are going to cause us all to be bowling alone someday. Nevertheless, the point remains that most subway riders wouldn't be as engaged with their fellow commuters in quite the way Smith was with his -- even though he clearly positions himself above them as an observer. And that doesn't even get to the issue of New Yorkers then and now who, by virtue of class, never condescend to ride with the rest of humanity.
THIS DAY IN NEW YORK CITY HISTORY
On July 3, 1868, Charles T. Harvey conducted the first test of New York's first elevated railway. The experimental section of the rail was built on lower Greenwich street and was designed to be pulled by cables according to a system that Harvey had invented and patented. The New York Times reported on July 4 that "the trial trip upon the elevated road in Greenwich street having been postponed on Thursday on account of an accident to the machinery came off yesterday at noon and was very satisfactory. The car ran easily from the Battery to Cortlandt street, starting at the rate of five miles an hour and increasing to a speed of ten miles. The company does not pretend with its present machinery to run the cars faster than fifteen miles an hour; but during the next two months will make arrangements for much more rapid motion."
Harvey's line would eventually become the Ninth Avenue El, and by mid-1879 it had reached 81st Street. Two years later, it was extended further, turning on 110th Street to Eighth Avenue, where it continued up to the Harlem River at 155th Street.
SOURCES:
Edwin G. Burroughs and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (Oxford UP), pp. 1053-54.
James Blaine Walker, Fifty Years of Rapid Transit (1918), available online at http://www.nycsubway.org/articles/fifty_years_07.html.
Images from http://www.cable-car-guy.com/html/ccnynj.html.
