Maeve Higgins: On New York's subway, everyone in this great city is equal

New Yorkers may have to look a little harder today for a sense of belonging, but it is all around in the old subway tunnels

'Chorus', by Ann Hamilton, a marble mosaic with text from the Declaration of Independence and the UN Declaration of Human Rights, at Cortlandt St subway station, New York City. Picture: Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

This is an exciting time for me, professionally, because, on Tuesday, February 1, my second collection of essays will be published in the US. The book is titled Tell Everyone On This Train I Love Them, and one of the essays reads a little like a love letter to the New York City subway. I wrote about how, for $2.75, you can travel the length and breadth of this great city, emerging from the depths up to wholly different neighbourhoods within minutes.

I tend to romanticise public transport and the subway is this country’s largest public transportation system. I want to see it as a place where everyone, whatever our backgrounds or ethnicities or projected futures, is more or less equal to each other. I wrote that essay a couple of years ago when the subway was in quite a different place. Today, that rosy vision is difficult to hold onto, and I worry that the subway is doing less rumbling and more crumbling. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the MTA, operates the subway and reported that after a 90% drop in ridership in the early days of the pandemic, weekday subway ridership in November of last year had reached about 56% of pre-pandemic levels, with 3.1m riders on an average day.

Then, along came the Omicron variant, frightening riders away again and sickening almost one in five MTA workers, causing some lines to shut down temporarily and delays in the rest. The New York Times reports: “In a financial plan released last month, the authority projected that even by 2025, the subway would have 223m fewer riders than it did in 2019, a drop of about 13%.”

There is also a feeling of being less safe than before, although the data on safety isn’t exactly clear.

Meanwhile, the shocking news of new attacks adds to the perception that riders are not as safe as we once were. Two New Yorkers were pushed in front of trains and killed, as well as a string of other incidents where mentally unwell people, often homeless and sheltering within the subway system, have hurt themselves or others. The new mayor, Eric Adams, is a former transit police officer and said that he believed that “actual crime and the perception of crime and the perception of disorder” all contributed to the public’s fears over the subway system’s safety.

It is natural some of the shine I gave the subway has been stripped away.

However, the subway system remains one of the city’s most impressive and democratic features. To try to recapture the feeling of both community and wonder I once had about this vast underground network of trains, I spent a recent Saturday down among other New Yorkers and tourists, taking the train and alighting at several stops for no reason other than to look around.

Well, specifically to look around at the art. There is subway art on the walls, the steps, the floor, and even the ceiling of the subway stations.

In my day-to-day rushing around, I often miss what’s all around me down on the subway platform, so this time I took a guided tour hosted by the Municipal Art Society. We started at Cortlandt St Station at the World Trade Center, destroyed in the 9/11 attack.

It’s so beautiful now; the walls are entirely covered, more than 4,350sq ft, with a white marble mosaic artwork made up of words from the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights and the US Declaration of Independence.

It’s very tactile, leading me to run my hands over the wall without even thinking, a rare thing in a subway station! The artwork is by Ann Hamilton and is named ‘Chorus’.

What struck me is how graceful and peaceful it was in its call to remember our highest ideals, and how fitting that is for a space that experienced such loss and chaos in the violence of the 9/11 attack. The way the art reflects the place and the community is intentional, and it’s essential.

Sandra Bloodworth is director of MTA Arts & Design (A&D), the programme responsible for visual and performing arts throughout the transit system. Ms Bloodworth joined MTA A&D as a manager in 1988 and has served as the director for 24 years.

Earlier that decade, the ‘Percent for Art Law’ was enacted, requiring that 1% of the budget for eligible city-funded construction be dedicated to creating public artworks. Since, she has worked with hundreds of artists through A&D permanent art commissions, digital arts, graphic art, photography, poetry, musical performances, and special programmes, all of which are intended “to engage riders, enrich stations, and encourage the use of mass transit”.

In the past decades, the A&D Percent for Art programme has become one of the world’s largest and most diverse collections of public art.

In an interview with the New York Academy of Art last year, Ms Bloodworth spoke about creating artwork for a place like a subway, about coming out into the public realm and including the people: “The government, the MTA, is spending money to create art. The first time I heard that, it sounded like a phenomenal thing, an amazing thing.

“And that was a responsibility; that what you do — that it was durable, it would last, and it would be there. The most important thing is that it’s created for the people that use this place. You look around at the people who are travelling through a station, at the community, at the people in the neighbourhood. That’s who you’re creating this work for. That has to ground both the panel when they are selecting and the artist when they are creating. Once you understand that, it drives everything.”

Instead of a stress-inducing commute underground, the network of stations becomes a wonderfully surprising subterranean art gallery. 

I have two contenders for my favourite pieces. One is at Houston St; a charming and witty series of mosaics called ‘Platform Diving’ by Deborah Brown depicting flooded stations, trains, tunnels, and sea creature passengers floating on the platform and in the trains. Perhaps it sounds a little scary, but the characters made me smile. The other is also a series of mosaics, right up on 125th St. The artist Faith Ringold created ‘Flying Home: Harlem’s Heroes and Heroines’, an artwork featuring Black leaders, artists, and athletes who contributed to the culture of this historic neighbourhood. Paul Robeson, Florence Mills, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, and many more are depicted flying through the air, and the joy buoys the entire mood of the station.

Things are difficult now, but in his beautiful book from 1949, Here is New York, E.B. White says, “the city makes up for hazards and deficiencies by supplying its citizens with massive doses of a supplementary vitamin — the sense of belonging to something unique, cosmopolitan and unparalleled”.

New Yorkers may have to look a little harder today for that sense of belonging, but really, it is all around us. We can find it on the walls, the floors, and even the ceilings of the old subway tunnels we pass through every day.