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You are currently browsing stories tagged with On the Subway
Celebrating the American Revolution
by Debbie Nathan 07/04/2010Neighborhood: Featured, Upper West Side
Young white man with large backpack, heavy French accent, and reasonably capable English: Excuse me, is there a local Number 2 train? It comes on this track? Middle-aged white New York woman with long, dangling earrings: No. This is the Number 1 track. Number 2 trains, they're all express. Over on that track. A Number 2 [...]
Get Off the Train Now!
by Danielle Winston 06/08/2008Neighborhood: Union Square
As the glass doors to Trader Joe’s swing away from me I struggle to enter the real word again: the one without cheap organic produce, and shelves of exotic cookie combinations like cashew caramel chip. Water spits down from the darkened sky, frizzing up my hair. All at once I’m balancing three overstuffed shopping bags, [...]
At the Prospect Park Zoo, 1965
by Kenneth P. Nolan 05/25/2008Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Park Slope
Billy Hederman and Eddie Babicke started the migration. So I applied and with their tepid references, “He’s OK, Bob,” I was hired. I was now an official busboy in the Prospect Park zoo cafeteria. Others from my working class Catholic parish adjacent to the park signed up as well. Mo Maloney was assigned to the carousel [...]
You Look Nice Tonight, That’s All
by Shawn Vandor 05/25/2008Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Park Slope
A friend told me recently, at a small dinner party at her and her husband’s brownstone, that she’d once been throttled on the subway. The train car, she said, was packed. For balance, she raised both arms into the air and held onto the metal bar above. A man stood behind her, she said, and [...]
Daydreaming on the Q
by Amanda McCormick 04/11/2008Neighborhood: Lower East Side
On the train on the way home, I scan the occupants of the car, playing Wildly Inappropriate Matchmaker, my favorite daydream. For the purposes of this exercise, I settle on a tall woman with black hair tied back tight, librarian glasses slipping down her nose as she reads a copy of Finnegans Wake. I want [...]
Local Stops
by Willie Perdomo 03/15/2008Neighborhood: Upper East Side
It’s brick outside, thermal-brick, coffee cup lids have coughing fits and a blind man with two good legs gets into my pocket by saying that I could be him one day. At the 116th stop Jane runs into Dick, all surprised and shit, she says, Wow, when did you move up here? Dick gives her the [...]
A Subway Hope
by Ella Mei Yon Biggadike 01/13/2008Neighborhood: West Village
I am standing on the F train platform, my toes just over the yellow line. I lean toward the darkness of the train tunnel. In the distance I can see the faint, low-lit squares of train windows passing through the darkness. Then there is the hollow rumble of the F train approaching from in between [...]
A Subway Grope
by I. Delaney 01/13/2008Neighborhood: Lower Manhattan
Having grown up in the City my entire life, I should have had my guard on and my extra sixth sense alert for the criminally suspicious. But I had just come off an awkward date, and I was still reflecting on its minute details, and otherwise pondering the futility of finding love in this hard-worn [...]
A Christmas Treasure
by Kevin Nolan 12/09/2007Neighborhood: Midtown
My wife is one of an elusive American species: the serious reader. And like many serious readers, she also indulges in crap. For a long stretch she indulged in a guilty pleasure known to many but not known to me, until one Christmas season years ago: the Regency-era paperback romance. These books aren’t the sexed-up bodice-rippers [...]
Intervention at 42nd Street
by Michelle Wilson 11/11/2007Neighborhood: Midtown
I hustle into the car, glad to secure a seat. It’s always musical chairs on the cross-town shuttle, full-grown adults making a mad dash to slip into any remaining sliver of real estate. The open desperation on their faces and their coiled, tense bodies once embarrassed me. But I’m used to it now. I’m one [...]
The Meathead on the No. 1 Train
by Lily Shen 11/11/2007Neighborhood: Upper West Side
During a packed, standing room only ride on an uptown No. 1 train, I tried to shut out the crowd, absorbing myself in the free AM New York newspaper I picked up that morning. Two men who were squeezed against each other began to argue. Their voices grew so alarmingly loud that I could no [...]
You’re in the Quiet Car
by Hal Sirowitz 10/09/2007Neighborhood: Across the River, Letter From Abroad
"Whether you know it or not, you’re in the Quiet Car," the conductor announced. "That means you have made a commitment to silence. The first obligation is to shut off your cell phones. And just because the train stops at a station doesn’t give you the right to turn it back on to listen to your [...]
