The Lifeblood of NYC

As you walk along the sidewalk of New York City, you’ll notice that periodically, the cement gives way to a metal grate. Sometimes, the reverberating rumbling echoes through these grates, telling you that a train is passing beneath your feet. Every time I hear that sound, my heart skips a beat.

Quintessential NYC, but the real life blood of the city is its metros

I’ve always loved the sound of trains. My aunt’s house is in the heart of Mumbai, right next to the railway tracks used by passing local trains. As a child, trapped inside with nothing to do while the adults slept or were busy in the kitchen, I would stand in my aunt’s balcony overlooking the tracks and watch the trains go by, lulled into a peaceful reverie as I listened to them.

But watching trains in Mumbai is very different from riding the dark and dirty metros of New York. Metro stations are gloomy from the lack of natural light and filthy from the many people rushing past, spilling their drinks, spitting, spreading dirt from the streets. The metro in New York has an equally repulsing reputation. It is known to be late, to be overcrowded, to be full of somber strangers avoiding eye contact with each other.

Yet I love them.

Every time I enter the station at 116^th to take the 1 to downtown (the 1 is my favorite line for its familiarity and location on the vibrant Broadway Ave.), I am always struck at how important the metro is in making the city run smoothly when I see how many people are waiting on the platform. Were the metro to stop, the city would come to a standstill.

The signs in some  stations are beautiful. Some also have murals

It comes as no surprise then that closures of metro lines are big news for the city. Next year the L, the main line connecting Brooklyn with downtown Manhattan, will be closed and so of course, the New York Times reported extensively (one article to be precise, but still) on it. I didn’t think much of this, since Brooklyn is so far from my daily life, until the bf and I decided to go there for a food festival held there over the weekend while he was visiting and what should have been a 45-minute commute with the L turned into three hours (it should have been two and a half, but we made a few wrong turns).

Three hours is a bit much even for me but most of the time, the journey on the metro is full of interesting happenings to make the time pass. There is a group of three men, one on the bass, one on the guitar and one singer, who hop onto the 1 quite frequently, sing a song between two stop sand then dash out to catch a different train, collecting as much money as they can before leaving. The other day I encountered two young men who danced for us passengers, complete with a portable boombox and feats of acrobatics using the polls on either side of the metro car. Whether you like it or not, you will get entertainment.

But there are also the passengers themselves who offer glimpses into their lives as we share a short part of journey together. There was a man who looked like a bouncer who spent five stops talking to his half-asleep colleague about which stop he would get off at, changing his mind several times and talking about the pros and cons of each. There was a spontaneous conversation on politics that happened between a New Yorker and two couples, one from Texas and the other from England. Listening to their conversation, one woman commented that this was the best metro ride she had ever been on since people were actually talking to each other. There was the couple, the man white, the woman Chinese, where the man spoke to his wife in perfectly fluent Chinese.

Whether or not I have the formal entertainment of street performers or the entertainment of people watching, I always enjoy listening to the sound of the train itself. For the duration of my commute, I once again fall into a reverie that only the sound of a train can bring.