Much of the subway’s complexity stems from the fact that it originated as two competing companies. There was the Manhattan based IRT and the Brooklyn based BMT, who not only laid their tracks without heed to each other, but sometimes worked at cross purposes. The end result is that the NYC subway is one of the more convoluted underground transit systems in the world.
1924 IRT
The two companies produced separate maps that focused on their own lines, often providing sketchy detail for the competition. This IRT map from 1924 shows all the boroughs, but doesn’t include any BMT lines. Often the maps would portray the company’s lines as straight and the competition’s as crooked. “The idea was simple,” writes Andrew Dow in Telling the Passenger Where to Get Off. “The straighter the line, the faster the trip would look to a customer.”
June Trotta, a banker from Brooklyn, was riding the uptown 5 train into Manhattan recently, and she was lost. The train stopped at Bowling Green, Trotta checked the map. The next stop was Fulton Street, and Trotta’s ears were beginning to turn red. “Oh no,” she said, turning to the woman next to her. “Why am I back where I started?” Trotta, a native New Yorker, doesn’t normally ride the 5. “I made myself get on it today,” she explained. “I’m trying to be a grownup about this.”
Four-point-seven million people ride the subway every day. Many of them are grownups, and many of them are lost. Among the eight largest underground rail systems: Berlin, Chicago, London, Madrid, Moscow, Paris, Tokyo, and New York, every city except for New York has a schematic map: a simplified diagram of the routes that run beneath the city, helping passengers get from point A to point B. The New York map, by contrast, is a mash up of underground lines and above ground geography, a dinosaur of design.
An old story I had forgotten about came back to me last week. It was a piece I did for Men’s Vogue, but sadly when that magazine folded the web archives were taken down. I thought maybe I would republish some parts of the piece here for posterity.
The men who built the New York City subway were known as Sand Hogs. They got dirty. They carved out the pathways that make this city work. They understood better than anyone the connection between these underground roads and the city above.
In 1916 Marchall Mabey was working beneath the East River with two other men when the pressurized shaft of the tunnel was punctured from above. As air rushed out Mabey was pulled through twelve feet of earth, through the river itself, and then ejected twenty five feet into the air.
“I was being held tight,” Mabey, the only survivor, later told reporters, “Tighter than any girl ever held me.” Few passengers today will experience the intimacy of subway and surface as Mabey did. A pedestrian walking above a train might feel it rumbling over the tracks below. The connection between that street and trains line on a map, however, is far less concrete.
