Under the Big Apple

Text and Photos by Jeneen R. Garcia
first published in Sun.Star Cebu in early 2004

If you just want a taste of the Big Apple, you can’t get closer to the real flavor than on the NYC Subway. The way the trains come and go every other minute it seems, you won’t be too surprised to find people move just as fast on ground level.

Just like the city itself, the subway crowd is a fascinating sampling of the world: blacks, whites, browns and yellows; executives, clerks and janitors; and, in the freezing cold of winter, people exaggeratedly wrapped up like Eskimos and people who insist on wearing tights and mini-skirts.

The buzz of conversation is American slang with a mix of Chinese, Spanish, Jamaican and a hundred other accents. But that’s no cause for stares—foreign languages are hardly exotic in a place where practically everyone is a foreigner.

At some point, EVERYONE goes down beneath the surface. With the infamous New York traffic, it doesn’t matter if you have two cars or three--you’re still immobilized if you get caught at rush hour. That’s when the subway becomes the Great Equalizer. Bums and Park Avenue residents alike stand elbow to elbow in a jampacked train if they want to get to where they’re going.

And because everyone goes down, the subway is a hub for advertising and public information. Sometimes people even get on to give speeches for various causes—a homeless mother, a young rapper starting out—and ask for financial support.

It’s not exactly the best way to see the city if you’re a tourist, but it DOES get you from the Museum of Modern Art to the Broadway shows at Times Square, from the Empire State to Chinatown and Little Italy, from Fifth Avenue to Macy’s. Underground, everything is connected.

On the subway you forget that NYC is actually split up into five boroughs across some three islands and the mainland. You can cross the Hudson River on the west to New Jersey and the East River to Brooklyn without having to get on a boat (or even having to see water). It’s your bridge between such diverse worlds as The Bronx up north and artsy Village in downtown Manhattan. An unlimited-ride MetroCard from a vending machine is your magic pass.

The trick is in designing your route to get the least number of stops, the least number of train transfers, the least number of blocks to walk—and deciding if you’re better off taking the bus from west to east Central Park to get to the Museum Mile. Buses are part of the subway system, and you swipe the same magical MetroCard when you get on.

But if you just want culture, there’s enough of it under New York. Painters, photographers, actors and musicians abound on New York’s sidewalks, and fortunately for them, a big chunk of the population contributes to their cause. To encourage the use of public transport, the Metropolitan Transport Authority decided to tap these crowd-drawers in a program called Arts for Transit.

Dancers and other performers are provided space in the subway stations to do their own thing. As diverse as New Yorkers are, so is their music—hiphop, jazz, reggae, traditional Japanese, classical violin, Mexican rondalla, a capella pop, among others.

Poems are posted inside the trains as part of a Poetry in Motion project. Visual artists are commissioned to do fascinating tile murals, some of which portray the sights to be seen above-ground. Some stations even have photo exhibits. And at the old Grand Central Station, there’s a Transit Museum chronicling the history of New York public transport.

Just take care to always consult your subway map. Some stations have the same name but are actually different stations, and one station may have different names, depending on which train you’re on. Make sure, too, that you’re waiting on the right platform, because under the streets, there are only subway signs to say whether you’re coming or going.

And if you’re alone on a train, uncertain where you’re headed, or standing dazed in the middle of a labyrinthine station, take heart that you’re in New York, New York—if you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere!

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