Culture
120 Years of New York’s Subterranean Literary Muse
The subway isn’t just buried in the bedrock of New York City — it’s embedded within its fiction, too. These archival photographs and literary quotes transport you through time.
Within a day of its opening on Oct. 27, 1904, the New York City subway was already inspiring lyricism: The Times marveled at its “olive-green woodwork, the unfamiliar air, the darkness alongside, and the sudden shooting into beautiful white stations like nothing that the elevated ever had.”
That’s just one day. Give novelists 120 years of packed daily commutes, late night rides home from bars and restaurants, early morning trips to the beach, and now the subway isn’t just buried in the bedrock of Manhattan, it’s burrowed deep within New York novels of the last twelve decades, a source of wonder, despair, quotidian boredom.
Join us as we ride alongside fictional characters plucked from the works of Edith Wharton, Ralph Ellison, Sylvia Plath, Lee Child, James Baldwin and so many more.
“Faces, hats, hands, newspapers jiggled in the fetid roaring subway car like corn in a popper. The downtown express passed clattering in yellow light, window telescoping window till they overlapped like scales.”
Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos
She and Mrs. Robichek edged into the sluggish mob at the entrance of the subway, and were sucked gradually and inevitably down the stairs, like bits of floating waste down a drain.
The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith
Now it seemed very warm in the subway car. The fan in the center of the ceiling was motionless. A bead of sweat splashed a panel in the story about the firespewing Flame, lean and balletic in the great Lou Fine style, that Joe had been pretending to read. He closed the comic book and stuck it back in his pocket.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
The train came bopping into the old drab station like some blazoned jungle of wonders. The letters and numbers fairly exploded in your face and they had a relationship, they were plaited and knotted, pop-eyed cartoon humanoids, winding in and out of each other and sweaty hot and passion dancing — metallic silver and blue and cherry-bomb red and a number of neon greens.
Underworld by Don DeLillo
Magically the five o’clock people came to life, bounced out of their subways, jumped out of their elevators, bells rang, elevator bells, streetcar bells, ambulance bells, the five o’clock people swept through the city hungrily, they covered the sun, their five o’clock faces looked eagerly toward Brooklyn, Astoria, the Bronx, Big Date Tonight.
Turn, Magic Wheel by Dawn Powell
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York. I’m stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that’s all there was to read about in the papers — goggle-eyed headlines staring up at me at every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway.
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Speed
In 1904, the express subway ride from the Brooklyn Bridge station to West 96th Street took, on average, 14 and a half minutes, a feat that dazzled both real riders and fictional ones.
The train rushed into the blackness with a phallic abandon, into the blackness which opened to receive it, opened, opened, the whole world shook with their coupling. Then, when it seemed that the roar and the movement would never cease, they came into the bright lights of 125th Street. The train gasped and moaned to a halt.
Another Country by James Baldwin
Pelham One Two Three came down the track. The amber and white marker lights at the top were like a pair of mismatched eyes. Beneath them, the sealed beams, which were the real eyes on the train, seemed by some optical trick to waver, to flicker like a candle in the wind. The train came on, as always with the appearance of going too fast to be able to stop. But it came to a smooth halt.
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three by John Godey
He found himself, next, slipping northward between the glazed walls of the subway, another languid crowd in the seats about him and the nasal yelp of the stations ringing through the car like some repeated ritual wail.
The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton
Crowds & Delays
Think the subway ever ran smoothly? The first day it was open, not only was it packed with “subway sightseers,” but travel “was considerably interrupted by long stops that nobody could or would explain clearly,” The Times said. “The effect was to knock the schedule to smithereens.”
For the past century, just like the rest of us, literary characters have been squeezed, smashed and hassled.
She detested New York subway trains for their grime and their noise, but even more for the claustrophobic nearness of so many human bodies, the rush-hour jam and jostle of flesh which seemed to neutralize, if not to cancel out, the privacy she had sought for so long.
Sophie’s Choice by William Styron
The subway pulled into Times Square, disgorged passengers, took more on, shut up its doors and shrieked away down the tunnel. Another shuttle came in, on a different track. Bodies milled in the brown light, a loudspeaker announced shuttles. It was lunch hour. The subway station began to buzz, fill with human noise and motion.
V. by Thomas Pynchon
An R train fat with people was sitting in the station making awkward attempts at sliding its doors shut.
The Fuck-Up by Arthur Nersesisan
The Subway at Night
“At night,” The Times wrote, “the alienation of one man in a crowd gives way to the solitude of a few waiting at desolate stations for long empty trains. These are the night workers, the lovers going home from an evening out and the loveless for whom the subways represent warmth and security.”
One of fiction’s most iconic nighttime riders is Lee Child’s peripatetic tough guy, Jack Reacher, who once encountered a suicide bomber on an uptown 6 train at 2 a.m.
I was riding the subway, in New York City. The 6 train, the Lexington Avenue local, heading uptown, 2 in the morning. I had gotten on at Bleecker Street from the south end of the platform into a car that was empty except for five people. Subway cars feel small and intimate when they’re full. When they’re empty they feel vast and cavernous and lonely.
Gone Tomorrow by Lee Child
They descended the subway stairwell at Astor Place and as they waited on the platform, then boarded the 6 train, felt it shut them out against the other night riders, whose heads lolled with the train’s movements on the weary sticks of their bodies, felt it shut them against the whole city everywhere around them.
The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem
The empty, air-conditioned subway car moved over the Manhattan Bridge and into the city. The sky was purple, and the half-lit moon peeked out beneath a pink cloud. Whenever the car made an abrupt stop, I slid farther down the blue plastic seats.
Happy Hour by Marlowe Granados
Most of the time, he didn’t mind riding the subway. It was a fast trip, and the clattering tracks and flashing lights kept a person distracted. But at times like this — idled without explanation, in the overheated darkness — it was hard not to think about just how deep under the earth the express track ran, or the mile of blackness that lay between him and the next stop.
Reliquary by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
People-watching
“Mark my words,” an “observant citizen” told The Times in 1904, “the subway is going to boom the newspaper business. When you get in, there’s nothing to look at except the people, and that’s soon a tiresome job.”
Tiresome? Tens of millions of riders — real and fictional — would disagree.
Only a few people. No one near her. She folded her arms and rested her head on the seat in front of her. Cool. It cooled. Yes, it was cooler and her head was beautifully warm and she would have Vinnie again and next time, some time, he would kiss her.
Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby
The girls were bright birds of paradise, the men, her artist’s eye noted, were gay, vital fauns. In the subway beside the laughing, happy groups, white faces showed pale and bloodless, other coloured faces loomed dull and hopeless.
Plum Bun by Jessie Redmon Fauset
Things whirled too fast around me. My mind went alternately bright and blank in slow rolling waves. We, he, him — my mind and I — were no longer getting around in the same circles. Nor my body either. Across the aisle a young platinum blonde nibbled at a Red Delicious apple as station lights rippled past behind her. The train plunged. I dropped through the roar, giddy and vacuum-minded, sucked under and out into late afternoon Harlem.
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
There was so much noise that Ma and I could speak little on the subway ride there. There were two boys about my age sitting across from us. As the taller one got up, a bulky knife fell out of his pocket. It was sheathed in leather, the black handle grooved to fit a large hand. I pretended I wasn’t looking and willed myself to be invisible.
Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok
We are 15, and are learning to memorize the subway lines as if they are the very veins that run through our bodies.
Brown Girls by Daphne Palasi Andreades
Nobody who’s lived in New York for more than a few months understands why a girl would actually like the subway. They don’t get the novelty of walking underground and popping back up across the city. … Belonging in the rush, locking eyes with another horrified passenger when a mariachi band steps on. On the subway, she’s actually a New Yorker.
One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston
Most of us stand clear of the closing doors; others step through and write what they see.