New York
In Rebuttal to Trump Official, M.T.A. Says Subway Is Getting Safer
In response to the Trump administration’s portrayal of the subway system as lawless, New York transit officials on Wednesday shot back: Crime is down, fare evasion is falling — and the nation’s largest transit system deserves far more money.
Janno Lieber, head of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said the agency would be taking “a very professional, fact-based approach” to the federal government’s demands last week for a list of statistics on transit crime, aiming to show that crime underground is the lowest it has been in more than a decade.
Still, a surge in unpredictable attacks in the subway remains troubling, M.T.A. officials acknowledged, and concerns about crime remain an obstacle to getting some riders to return. A January rider survey showed that a little more than half of subway customers — 56 percent — say they feel safe on trains.
New York transit officials have remained defiant weeks into their standoff with federal officials, which began when Washington demanded the halt of congestion pricing last month. When New York refused, the skirmish escalated, with Sean Duffy, the secretary of the U.S. Department of Transportation, threatening to defund transit projects, if the state did not provide the crime stats. Over the weekend, he referred to the subway system as a “shithole,” WNBC-TV reported, while repeating his demands.
A formal response to the secretary is in the works, but the transit authority wanted to preview the information, Mr. Lieber said at a board meeting on Wednesday.
“We’re going to stay coolheaded because the facts are on our side,” Mr. Lieber said.
Excluding 2020 and 2021, during the height of the pandemic when subway ridership was way down, last year had the fewest number of felonies reported in the transit system in 15 years, Michael Kemper, chief security officer at the M.T.A. and a former chief of transit at the Police Department, said at the board meeting. Weekly ridership has rebounded to about 75 percent of prepandemic levels.
During its rebuttal, the transit agency attempted to turn the tables and requested a larger share of federal transportation funding, at a time when it is trying to pay for its next five-year, $68 billion capital plan budget.
The transit agency receives between $1.5 billion to $2.5 billion a year from the federal government, which is used for improvements, like repairing outdated electrical equipment, as well as some basic maintenance, Mr. Lieber said.
John McCarthy, the chief of policy and external relations at the M.T.A., said the agency receives just 17 percent of a federal pool of transit funding, despite carrying 43 percent of the nation’s transit ridership.
“It’s shortchanging low- and middle-income New Yorkers,” he said.
In a statement, a spokeswoman for Mr. Duffy said a spate of recent violent crimes, including the death of a woman who was set on fire on the subway last year, has left riders on edge. “The M.T.A. can try and gaslight the American people, but attacks like these make every passenger fear becoming the next victim. It should have never gotten to this point for the governor and the M.T.A. to crack down on crime.”
Mr. Duffy demanded data on the number of assaults committed on passengers and employees; efforts to prevent “subway surfing,” the practice of riding moving trains; and the money spent on a number of security-related projects.
The back-and-forth over subway crime comes as the Trump administration and the M.T. A. are battling over congestion pricing in federal court. The tolling program, which began in January, charges most drivers $9 to enter the busiest section of Manhattan during peak hours. It has reduced traffic while aiming to raise $15 billion for critical transit repairs and upgrades.
Mr. Trump has vowed to kill congestion pricing, expressing concerns that the tolls would drive visitors and businesses away from Manhattan, though there is little evidence of that so far.
While Mr. Duffy did not mention congestion pricing while demanding the subway crime stats from the M.TA., a number of transit supporters questioned the timing of the request, which came shortly after Gov. Kathy Hochul reiterated her support for the tolling program.
Last month, Mr. Duffy withdrew federal authorization for congestion pricing, which was approved by the Biden administration. Federal officials initially gave New York until March 21 to stop charging the tolls, but last week Mr. Duffy offered a 30-day reprieve in a combative social media post, in which he described the program as a “slap in the face to hard working Americans.”
Mr. Duffy also put Ms. Hochul on notice that “your refusal to end cordon pricing and your open disrespect towards the federal government is unacceptable,” according to his post.
The M.T.A. has sued federal transportation officials and promised to keep collecting tolls unless a court orders it to stop. Legal and transportation experts have said that federal officials do not have the authority to reverse course now.
In raising the specter of crime in the subway system, Mr. Duffy is poking a sensitive topic among New Yorkers. The M.T.A. has said that, even as subway crime overall was declining, there was a rise in assaults underground.
In 2023, for the first time in nearly two decades, felony assaults outnumbered robberies in the subway, raising concerns that the nature of violence underground was becoming more unpredictable.
In recent months, a few high-profile crimes have shaken riders, including the one that Mr. Duffy’s spokeswoman referred to, when Debrina Kawam, a 57-year-old woman, died after being set on fire, as she slept on a train in December. Later that month, Joseph Lynskey was shoved in front of an oncoming train at the 18th Street station in Manhattan and survived. There were 10 murders in the subway in 2024, up from three in 2019.
Late last year, following an overnight slashing attack on an A train that injured a conductor, Ms. Hochul ordered 1,000 members of the National Guard to begin patrolling the subways. As of earlier this month, about 1,250 Guard members, M.T.A. officers and state police officers patrolled the system, according to the governor’s office. In addition, thousands of city police officers patrol the subway.
Fare evasion, a frequent target for critics of the transit authority, is trending down, but also remains a major concern, Mr. Lieber said. In fall 2024, 10 percent of subway riders did not pay the fare, down from 14 percent in the spring. On buses, 45 percent did not pay the fare in the fall, down from 50 percent in the spring.
It is unclear if the federal government will be satisfied with the M.T.A.’s findings, which it will formally submit before the end of the month. Some transit observers have questioned whether the administration has ulterior motives in painting the agency as inept.
Rachael Fauss, a senior policy adviser for Reinvent Albany, a government watchdog group, gave the M.T.A. credit for releasing detailed data about crime in the transit system and congestion pricing. But, she added, “the Trump administration doesn’t care about the facts.”
Federal officials could threaten to delay or withhold funding to gain political leverage in their effort to end congestion pricing, transportation and legal experts said. The M.T.A. is seeking $14 billion from Washington in its next five-year capital budget.
New York’s leaders cannot count on federal funds for the transit system’s capital needs, Ms. Fauss said, and should instead look for local revenue sources, including raising money from suburban areas that have benefited from transit investments.
During Wednesday’s meeting, Mr. Lieber emphasized, “We’re not out to make any enemies; we’re literally in the bridges business.”
Still, one M.T.A. board member could not resist taking a jab at Mr. Duffy.
Neal Zuckerman, the chair of the finance committee, invited the transportation secretary to attend their next meeting, in a post on social media.
“Come on down, Mr. Duffy,” he wrote. “We will protect you from the ‘scary subway.’ You’ll be ok.”
New York
Essential New York City Movies Picked by Ira Sachs and Blondie’s Debbie Harry and Chris Stein
Film
‘Make Way for Tomorrow’ (1937), directed by Leo McCarey
The log line: After the bank forecloses on their home, an elderly couple must separate, each living with a different one of their adult children.
The pitch: “It’s a film that Orson Welles famously said ‘would make a stone cry,’” says Sachs, 60, about McCarey’s movie, singling out a long sequence at the end that depicts “a date through certain lobbies and bars of New York City that offers a snapshot of Midtown in the ’30s.”
‘The World of Henry Orient’ (1964), directed by George Roy Hill
The log line: A wily 14-year-old girl and her best friend follow a ridiculous concert pianist, on whom they have a crush, around the city.
The pitch: Hill’s 1960s romp inspired Sachs’s film “Little Men” (2016), which is about boys around the same age as these protagonists. “It’s an extraordinarily sweet film that also seems, to me, very honest,” he says.
‘Coming Apart’ (1969), directed by Milton Moses Ginsberg
The log line: Rip Torn plays an obsessive psychiatrist who secretly films all the women passing through his home office, inadvertently capturing his own mental breakdown.
The pitch: Shot in one room with a fixed camera, Ginsberg’s film “really feels of a time,” says Sachs. It’s also “very sexual and very free,” reminding him of what’s possible when it comes to making movies.
‘Deadly Hero’ (1975), directed by Ivan Nagy
The log line: A disturbed, racist cop saves a cellist from a crook, only to become her tormentor.
The pitch: Harry, 80, and Stein, 76, were extras in Nagy’s film, which stars Don Murray, Diahn Williams and James Earl Jones as the cop, the cellist and the crook, respectively. The pair call the movie “[expletive] weird,” but also say that their day rate — $300 — “was the most money we’d ever made on anything” up to that point.
‘News From Home’ (1976), directed by Chantal Akerman
The log line: An experimental documentary by Akerman, a Belgian filmmaker who moved to New York in her early 20s, the film features long takes of the city and voice-over in which the director reads letters from her mother.
The pitch: “I’m intrigued by how beauty contains sadness in the city,” says Sachs. Not only is her film a “beautiful record of the city” but it captures “what it is to be alone here, to have left some sort of community and, in particular for Chantal, separated from her mother.”
‘Wolfen’ (1981), directed by Michael Wadleigh
The log line: Albert Finney stars as a former N.Y.P.D. detective who returns to the job to solve a violent and bizarre string of murders.
The pitch: Wadleigh’s film is not only a vehicle for Finney, says Stein, it also “has a lot of footage from the South Bronx when it was still completely destroyed” by widespread arson in the 1970s.
‘Losing Ground’ (1982), directed by Kathleen Collins
The log line: Collins’s film — the first feature-length drama for a major studio directed by an African American woman — observes a rocky relationship between a college professor and her painter husband.
The pitch: Sachs calls “Losing Ground” “a revelation.” The characters are “so human and fascinating and extremely modern,” he says, adding that he loves a movie that “exists in some very complete version of the local.”
‘After Hours’ (1985), directed by Martin Scorsese
The log line: In Scorsese’s black comedy, an office worker (Griffin Dunne) has a surreal and bizarre evening of misadventure while trying to get back uptown from a woman’s apartment in SoHo.
The pitch: Harry and Stein recommend this zany tale and borderline “nightmare” for the way it captures a bygone era of New York. “It’s this great image of [Lower Manhattan] when it was still raw, you know, Wild West territory,” Stein says.
‘Downtown 81’ (shot in 1980-81, released in 2000), directed by Edo Bertoglio
The log line: Bertoglio’s film is a striking portrait of a young artist who needs to raise money so he can return to the apartment from which he’s been evicted.
The pitch: Jean-Michel Basquiat stars as the artist in this snapshot of life in New York during the ’80s. Despite all the drama surrounding it — postproduction wasn’t completed until 20 years after filming, and for many years the movie was considered lost — the film is notable, says Stein, because “it’s got all the characters and all our buddies in it.”
These interviews have been edited and condensed.
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Theater
Quincy Tyler Bernstine
A master of active stillness, the 52-year-old Bernstine (imposing in the 2024 revival of John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt,” above) has that great actorly gift of making thought visible. A natural leader onstage, she compels audiences to follow her.
Victoria Clark
One of the theater’s best singing actors, with Tonys for Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas’s “The Light in the Piazza” (2005) and David Lindsay-Abaire and Jeanine Tesori’s “Kimberly Akimbo” (above, 2022), Clark, 66, performs not on top of the notes but through them, delivering complicated characterization and gorgeous sound in each breath.
Susannah Flood
Flood, 43, is a true expert at confusion, a good thing because she often plays characters like the twisted-in-knots Lizzie in Bess Wohl’s “Liberation” (above, 2025). What makes that confusion thrilling is how she grounds it not in a lack of information or purpose but, just like real life, in an excess of both.
Jonathan Groff
The rare musical theater man with the unstoppable drive of a diva, Groff, 41, sweats charisma, as audience members in ringside seats at Warren Leight and Isaac Oliver’s Broadway musical “Just in Time” (above, 2025) recently discovered. Giving you everything, he makes you want more.
William Jackson Harper
Unmoored characters are often unsympathetic. But whether playing a confused doctor in the 2024 revival of Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” or a delusional bookstore clerk in Eboni Booth’s “Primary Trust” (above, 2023), Harper, 46, makes vulnerability look easy, and hurt hard.
Joshua Henry
There are singers who blow the roof off theaters, but the 41-year-old Henry’s voice is so huge and deeply connected to universal feelings that he seems to be singing inside you. Currently starring in the Broadway revival of “Ragtime” (above, by Lynn Ahrens, Stephen Flaherty and Terrence McNally), he blows the roof off your head.
Mia Katigbak
Superb and acidic in almost any role — in distress (Annie Baker’s 2023 “Infinite Life,” above) or in command (2024’s “Uncle Vanya”) — Katigbak, 71, finds the sweet spot in even the sourest truths of the human condition.
Judy Kuhn
With detailed intelligence and specific intention informing everything she sings, Kuhn, 67, is (among other things) a Stephen Sondheim specialist — her take on Fosca in “Passion” (above, 2012) was almost literally wrenching. It requires intellectual stamina to keep up with the master word for word.
Laurie Metcalf
The fierce, sharp persona you may know from her years on “Roseanne” (1988-97) is about a tenth of the blistering commitment Metcalf, 70, offers onstage in works like Samuel D. Hunter’s “Little Bear Ridge Road” (above, 2025). She goes there, no matter the destination.
Deirdre O’Connell
For 40 years an Off Broadway treasure, O’Connell, 72, handles the most daring, out-there material — including, recently, a 12-minute monologue of cataclysmic gibberish in Caryl Churchill’s “Kill” (above, 2025) — as if it were as ordinary as barroom gossip.
Conrad Ricamora
Revealing the Buddy Holly in Benigno Aquino Jr. (in the 2023 Broadway production of David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s “Here Lies Love”) or the queer wolf in Abraham Lincoln (in Cole Escola’s “Oh, Mary!,” above, last year), Ricamora, 47, is uniquely capable of great dignity and great silliness — and, wonderfully, both together.
Andrew Scott
It’s a tough competition, but Scott, 49, may have the thinnest skin of any actor. Whether he’s onstage (playing all the characters in Simon Stephens’s Off Broadway “Vanya,” above, in 2025) or on film, every emotion — especially rue — reads right through his translucence.
Michael Patrick Thornton
Some actors are hedgehogs, projecting one idea blazingly. Thornton, 47, is a fox, carefully hoarding ideas and motivations. Keeping you guessing as Jessica Chastain’s benefactor in the 2023 revival of Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” or as a pathetic lackey in last year’s production of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” (above, center), he holds you in his thrall.
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How can people possibly afford to live in one of the most expensive cities on the planet? It’s a question New Yorkers hear a lot, often delivered with a mix of awe, pity and confusion.
We surveyed hundreds of New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save. We found that many people — rich, poor or somewhere in between — live life as a series of small calculations that add up to one big question: What makes living in New York worth it?
Here’s one way to make New York more affordable: triple your income. After moving from Baton Rouge, La., in 2016 to attend graduate school, Daniel Babin lived mostly on red beans and rice or homemade “slop pots,” renting rooms in what he called a “cult house” and a building on a block his girlfriend was afraid to visit.
Then, in January, he got a job as a geologist with a mineral exploration company, with a salary of $200,000, plus a $15,000 signing bonus. A new city suddenly opened up to him. “I can take a woman out on a $300 dinner date and not look at the check and not feel bad about it,” he said. He also now has health insurance.
Mr. Babin, 32, a marine geologist who also leads an acoustic string band, now navigates two economic worlds, one shaped to his postdoctoral income of $70,000 a year — when his idea of a date was a walk in Central Park — and the other reflecting his new income. In this world, he is shopping for a vintage Martin Dreadnought guitar, for which he will gladly drop $4,000.
Finding a New Base Line
On a recent morning at Mr. Babin’s home in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where he shares a 6,800-square-foot cohousing space with 17 roommates, he was still figuring out how to manage this split.
“I’m feeling less inclined to just let it rip than I was a few months ago,” he said of his spending habits. He socks away $1,500 from each paycheck, and has not moved to replace his 2003 Toyota Corolla, an “absolute dump” given to him by his father. “Hopefully, I’m returning a little bit to some kind of base-line lifestyle that I’ve established for myself over the last five years,” he continued. “Because the fear is lifestyle inflation. You don’t want to just make more money to spend more money. That’s not the point, right?”
Lightning Lofts, the cohousing space where Mr. Babin has lived since January 2024, bills itself as part of a “social wellness movement” and seeks to continue the ethos of Burning Man, the annual communal art and cultural festival in the Nevada desert.
For a room with an elevated loft bed and use of common areas, Mr. Babin pays $1,400 a month in rent, plus another $250 for utilities and weekly housecleaning.
He was first drawn to the organization through its events, including open mic “salons” where he played music or read from his science fiction writings. These were free or very cheap nights out, unpredictable and fascinating.
“You would see dance and tonal singing, and some dude wrote an algorithm that can auto-generate A.I. video based on what you’re saying — beautiful storytelling,” he said.
“So I just showed up every month, basically, until they let me live here.”
The room was a good deal. He had looked at a nearby building where the rent was $1,900 for a room in a basement apartment that flooded once a month. “Ridiculous,” he said.
But beyond its financial appeal, Mr. Babin liked the loft’s social life. “I used to be chronically lonely, and I just don’t feel lonely anymore,” he said. “Which is fantastic in a crazy place like New York. It’s so alive and it’s so isolating at the same time.”
Splurging on Ski Trips
Before Mr. Babin got his new job, he used to go to restaurants with friends and not eat, trying to save up $35 for a “burner” party — in the spirit of Burning Man — or Ecstatic Dance, a recurring substance-free dance party. He loved to ski but could not afford a hotel, so he would carry his old skis and beat-up boots to southern Vermont and back on the same day.
“Going on a hike is a pretty cheap hobby,” he said, recalling his money-saving measures. “Living without health insurance is a good one.”
He still appreciates a good hike, he said. But on a recent ski trip, he splurged on new $700 boots and another $300 worth of gear. “I’m like, this is something I’ve wanted for 10 years, so I deserve it,” he said.
He bought a $600 drone to take pictures for his social media accounts, and then promptly crashed it into the Caribbean (he’s now replacing the rotors in hopes of returning it to health).
He cut out the red beans and rice, he said, but his usual meal is still a modest $13 sandwich from the nearby bodega or $10 for pizza. “If I’m getting takeout and it’s less than $17, I don’t feel too bad about it,” he said.
A Future After Cohousing
A big change is that dating is much more comfortable now, and he feels more attractive as a marriage prospect. “It turns out that a lot more people pay attention to you if you offer them dinner instead of a walk in the park,” he said.
He is now thinking of leaving the cohousing space — not just because he can afford to, but because his work has kept him from joining house events, like the regular potluck dinners. “I sometimes feel like a bad roommate, because part of being here is participating,” he said. “I feel like there might be someone who would enjoy the community aspect more than I’m capable of contributing right now.”
He sounds almost wistful in discussing his former economizing. If it weren’t for the dating issue, he said, he would not need the higher income or lifestyle upgrades. “I never really felt like I was compromising on what I wanted to do,” he said.
He paused. “It’s just that what I was comfortable with has changed a little bit.”
We are talking to New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save.
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