Subway Magic

It's official: I am totally in love with the New York Subway System. Firstly, I am beside myself to get a break from driving, paying for gas and car expenses, etc. etc. $80 a month for unlimited rides all the time sounds like the deal of the century from where I'm sitting. While other locals pass the time on the train listening to their favorite new tunes on their ipods (in fact I have been shocked with the diverse population of avid ipod users, from blue collar workers to elementary schoolers) or immersing themselves in a book or magazine, I pass the time by watching them. Not in a scary stalker way (I hope) I just see stories all around and I don't want to miss any of them (plus I have found on the occasion or two that I have started some reading I have ended up missing my stop).

When my mom was in town a couple of men trudged onto the subway, one fairly well dressed sort of dragging the other pretty bedraggled looking one along. The bedraggled one, we'll call him Paulo, was just barely hanging on, and he seemed to have a really sad look on his face. The spiffier one, we'll call Jefe, kept trying to reassure him and looked up a couple of times and just kind of smiled and shrugged over the state of his friend. I became dismayed because Paulo was sort of swaying right over my mom's infamous curly hair and I was convinced for several minutes that he was going to wretch all over her. He eventually grabbed on to another handle on the other side of the car, his friend (or lover?) all the while trying to console him. Mom and I both studied him the better part of the ride and neither one of us could figure out if something utterly horrible had just happened to him or if he had had one (or seven) too many. I invented the story that they had been at a dinner party, and while they were there he had gotten a call that his favorite grandmother was deathly ill in the hospital and probably wouldn't recover. Mom thought maybe Jefe had just broken up with Paulo, or at least someone had just broken his heart mightily. Sigh. I guess we will never know the truth.

Another thing worth mentioning (I'm just getting warmed up) are the wonderful art installations. I had no idea how many glorious creations they had been putting up in stations around the city for the past 23 years (the city started a program in 1985 to help fund these artists endeavors and have been slowly adding more every year)! I have literally stopped in my tracks upon rounding the corner and "discovering" (at least it feels as if you are) some of them. One of the first ones I saw is two stops up from us in Williamburg. The title of the series is "Signs of Life" by Jackie Chang.



Another one that I see a lot is the "Life Underground" series by Tom O'Herness. These are scattered all throughout the Union Square/14th St. stop on the L line, which is the train that takes us from Williamsburg to Manhattan. I can't say that these are my favorite, there's something about them that are a bit perverse. Some of the women creatures look topless to me and others look like they're up to no good. Sort of like lemmings. But metal.



Am I wrong? Do they not seem a bit nefarious?
One of the ones that impressed me most is at the Bryant Park stop, literally right beneath Bryant Park (for those of you who are familiar with Project Runway, I was amused to walk through one day, and the park was bursting with people, and also a huge group of business people, still in the work clothes, doing yoga together on the lawn)...Anyway this installation is so expansive, you have to take several long hallways to get to your train and the mosaic just keeps going and going, these pictures really do not do it justice.


Artist Sam Kunce aptly titled it "Under Bryant Park."
The most surprising one I've seen so far is at the Penn Station stop, only because it is so not what you would expect to find around the subway (if one were to have an expectation about subway art in the first place). It's called "Garden of Circus Delights" by Eric Fishl. Again the pictures do not really do justice to the detail and color that hits you in several different spots.


You really just need to come up and visit and see for yourself.