At the elevated station on 225th Street at Broadway, we stood in what physically seemed to be the Bronx -- across the water from the city -- but politically is in the borough of Manhattan. The Army Corps of Engineers' rerouting of Spuyten Duyvil Creek to create the Harlem River Ship Channel is responsible. In the late 19th century, a canal was built to shorten the route from the Hudson River to Long Island Sound, which the subway took advantage of with the construction of a shorter and cheaper bridge.
And that's the story of the subway: change. There was public transit prior to the subway -- elevated locomotives and streetcars plied the city. But passengers who had little use for sooty trains or plodding streetcars surged into the electric-powered, grade-separated subway cars. From 1910 to 1940, the crowded tenements of the Lower East Side that photographer Jacob Riis made the shame of the nation lost 63 percent of their population. Thanks to the mobility offered by the subway, they moved up and out to formerly rural areas. During the same time period, Brooklyn's Coney Island, where the subway opened in 1915, grew by 921 percent.
The Manhattan skyline peeks out from the 100-year-old subway line.
(Frank Franklin/AP)
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Standing at the 168th Street station, the evolution of the system stares.
The platforms on each side have at least three different styles, from dignified tile to brutal concrete, for just above was the home of the New York Highlanders, who became the Yankees in 1913. Due to the crowds, the platforms were extended, and extended again. The old stadium site became home to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital (now New York-Presbyterian).
Then there's the dirt. Despite the clean-up of the graffiti-splattered cars, and an overall neater system, New York's subway stations are still pretty dirty compared to Washington's 1970s Metro. Cigarette butts, stray beer cans and the sad remnants of once Happy Meals litter the trackbed.
When a woman on the tour remarks on the filth, especially on the tracks, a fellow tourgoer rejoins in a pronounced outer borough accent, "It's open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. When exactly is the good time to clean it?"
Times Square station is the system's busiest, serving 500,000 people a day. Deep in a corner, to the west of the platform for the shuttle that runs between Times Square and Grand Central Station, Cunningham points out what may be the best place to see the original 1904 line. The shuttle still runs on the trackbed that was part of the first chunk of New York City's subway. It begins after a deep, slowing curve that today's engineers would never allow as it heads from the West Side to the East Side.
Just to the north of the shuttle track is a closed entrance to the Knickerbocker Hotel ("Fifth Avenue Service at Broadway Prices!" was their motto), its name still in rusty, faded brass above the door in full public view. At that point you are also standing in the sub-basement of the old New York Times building, the one now cloaked in the news "zipper." The Times also used to have direct access to the station, and pressmen would load the day's editions onto subway cars for distribution.
Farther south at Astor Place station, also part of the original line, a former entrance to a Wanamaker's department store now leads to a Kmart.
Change.
