Ode to the MTA

Of course, like everyone (except my Mom), I love New York. But I think that more than I love New York, I love the NYC subway system.

In Canada, subway systems are tidy grid-like networks that shuttle you between strategic, budgetworthy locations while keeping their arms inside the car at all times.

In New York, the subway grid is more like an additional subterranean layer to the city that stretches its tentacles in every direction, through areas you have to travel every day, like it or not, and others you may never get around to checking out in a lifetime of city living. It’s a giant machine that moves people and garbage and god only knows what else locally and expressively, 24 hours a day.

It’s hot, it’s gummy, it has its smells. One gets the feeling it’s so large it cannot be maintained all at once.

There’s a Vegas-like effect down there that can make it difficult to guess what time of day or day of week it might be.

In other cities, the subway will tell you, perhaps more clearly than anything else, that it is rush hour, that Saturday shopping is well under way, or that the good side of clubbing ended an hour ago. But in New York, at midnight, someone is going to work in a tie. At 8am, another is just heading to Shelter for an afterparty. Swing parties can end at 9:30pm, and people will actually show up for hip hop classes at 10am on a Sunday.

And it’s all sustained by this cranky sewer-dwelling creature that’ll eat you for breakfast and then spit you out either half a block or an entire borough from your destination.