My Life on the Subway

I have been taking the New York City subway for twenty-five years. My first train was the 7. It’s considered a national treasure for its diversity, and also very fast if you catch the express from Queensboro Plaza to Sixty-first Street–Woodside. Then for a long time I was on the 2/3, first in Manhattan, where it was speedy, and later in Brooklyn, where it was slow. Briefly, I had to catch a bus to get to the Q, but it was worth it to go over the Manhattan Bridge and see the river and the skyline. For six months, I lived directly above the C train, so close that I could hear it rumbling into the station from my apartment. Then the G—initially a disappointing train, so truncated that in some stations you had to run to the middle of the platform to get on, and the only one that doesn’t go into Manhattan. But as time passed, and more and more of my destinations were in Brooklyn, it was just right. The G was all I needed. When I moved back to the 2/3, it was a mixed blessing. I could go into Manhattan again—but did I really want to?

When I was younger, I had my share of adventures on the subway. Once, while riding the 1, I fell asleep and ended up at the last station, in the Bronx. A man had his hand in my jacket pocket and was trying to remove my wallet. I grabbed it, we wrestled briefly, and he let it go. “Be careful,” he said, as if he were just testing my vigilance. “Thank you,” I said, as if I believed him. Another time, I found myself very drunk near N.Y.U. I bought a two-dollar falafel. I don’t blame the falafel for what happened next, which was that I rode the 2 train back to my station, and then, as soon as it pulled out, threw up on the tracks. I am very, very sorry. One time, I fell asleep on the train (again) and was awoken at Eastern Parkway–Brooklyn Museum—back then, the final stop at which white people would get out. “This is your stop,” someone said, and they were right. I once had a first date that ended with a trip on the slightly obscure R train. I sang a little song about it to my date: “The R is a train / You don’t take / Very often.” She liked my song. Now we are married.

As I got older and developed some responsibilities, the subway sometimes let me down. I have been late to work because of police investigations and medical emergencies, and unable to board the C at Clinton-Washington during rush hour because it was too crowded. During the “summer of Hell,” in 2017, when years of underinvestment finally became apparent everywhere on the system, I started leaving ten minutes early for every trip. It wasn’t always enough. In 2015, our first baby, a week before his birth, developed a heart condition; we took the G to the L to reach his doctor in Union Square. Three years later, our second baby got a fever and had to go to an emergency room in Park Slope. We took a cab.

I have been, at times, disloyal. Our second baby was born while our first still rode around in a stroller. I imagined the logistics of getting them down into the Classon Avenue G stop and bought a car. When the pandemic reached New York, eighteen months later, we drove that car everywhere. There was hardly any traffic. We could get to Jacob Riis beach in twenty-five minutes. The only sounds at night were those of ambulance sirens.

On leave that summer and fall from my teaching job at Columbia University, I didn’t take the subway for ten whole months. When I went back to work, in early 2021, the university was offering us free parking, in case we wanted to avoid the train. I drove twice, but on the way back the second time it took me two hours to get home to Brooklyn, crawling much of the way on the B.Q.E. I started taking the subway again. It was empty and a little eerie. Everyone wore a mask. There seemed to be more people acting erratically, but I chalked it up to low ridership. There had always been people acting erratically on the train. Now, I thought, they just stood out.

Before the pandemic, in the wake of Superstorm Sandy and the summer of Hell, the story of the subway was one of disinvestment exacerbated by climate change. As the New York Times explained in a 2017 investigation, New York City and State had started cheating the subway of its fair share of the revenue back in the nineteen-nineties. With more severe storms flooding the system, the subway was eventually going to drown.

This story is still true. M.T.A. leaders recently explained to Gothamist that the subway system is being held together by “rubber bands and paper clips,” as well as “chewing gum and twine.” But the state of the city in the wake of the pandemic has raised the question of whether a different kind of disinvestment—in people and their mental and material well-being—will cause the system to collapse before the next big rainfall would.

Subway crime is an obsession of New Yorkers’, for obvious reasons. On the subway you are trapped, underground; figures of authority are hidden behind glass, or in a control booth, or absent entirely. When it comes to the most dramatic and horrible of subway crimes—the sudden push off a platform into the path of an oncoming train—there is arguably no place where New Yorkers are more vulnerable.

I recently read a paper in the journal JAMA Psychiatry about the identities and mind-sets of people who’d pushed others onto subway tracks in New York City. I found it strangely heartening. The authors were able to examine the medical and police records of twenty individual subway pushers. Thirteen were homeless, nineteen had previously been hospitalized at psychiatric institutions, all were unemployed, and almost all were suffering from delusions—for the most part, they believed that they were committing a heroic deed. One man thought that he was avenging the death of his niece; another, protecting his wife. One was convinced that he was a “detective who [was] fighting against crimes.” It was not malevolence but madness that drove them. The authors pointed out, a little optimistically perhaps, that people in the grip of intense psychosis were highly visible, and urged city officials to get them off the subway. The paper was from 1992.

The subway’s recovery from the pandemic has been fitful, a tale of stops and starts. Ridership is back up to more than a billion trips per year, but it’s well short of 2019 levels. Congestion pricing, which should provide both a financial and a psychological boost to the system, was passed by the state legislature after years of debate, then abruptly paused by Governor Kathy Hochul in 2024, and at last implemented this month, at a lower price point. Also, there is crime, and the perception of crime: every time it seems like the system is returning to its normal routine as a miracle of convenience, something we can simply take for granted, a high-profile incident puts it back in the news.

Five incidents from the past two years form a sort of prisoner’s dilemma for riders and city authorities who worry that, if the subway collapses, the city will go with it. The first was the killing of Jordan Neely, a former Michael Jackson impersonator, by Daniel Penny, an ex-marine, in May, 2023, on an uptown-bound F train. Multiple witnesses noted that Neely had boarded the F train and started acting in an aggressive and angry manner; according to those same accounts, he hadn’t actually assaulted anyone before Penny put him in a choke hold for almost six minutes. Last month, a Manhattan jury found Penny not guilty of criminally negligent homicide; his first interview after the verdict was with Jeanine Pirro, of Fox News.

The second incident was the shooting of Dajuan Robinson, in March, 2024, after he boarded an express A train at Nostrand Avenue and began harassing Younece Obuad, a fellow-rider. The two began fighting, and a woman who appeared to be with Obuad stabbed Robinson in the back; Robinson pulled a gun on Obuad, who then managed to wrest the gun from Robinson and shoot him with it. Meanwhile, other people were trapped in the car with them from Nostrand to Hoyt-Schermerhorn. The M.T.A. had locked the doors between cars on this particular type of train, for safety reasons.

The third incident emerged from the first two. After the Robinson shooting, the N.Y.P.D. held a press conference, during which it pointed out that Robinson had entered the Nostrand station through the emergency exit, without paying his fare. Police leaders stressed the need for more “quality of life” enforcement. Janno Lieber, the friendly, rumpled head of the M.T.A., called fare evasion the “No. 1 existential threat” to the subway system, because “it says at the doorway, this is not an orderly place.” A month later, in September of last year, police were chasing a turnstile jumper through an L-train station when he pulled a knife on them on the platform. The officers opened fire, wounding the man but also an officer and two bystanders, including a forty-nine-year-old hospital worker who was shot in the head. (The worker survived but emerged with brain damage, and his temporary guardian is now suing the city.)

The final two incidents happened recently, within ten days of each other. In one, a woman sleeping on an F train at Coney Island was set on fire and burned to death, while the people nearby, including the alleged perpetrator, watched. In the other, a man standing on a 1-train platform in Chelsea was shoved onto the tracks by a stranger. “By God’s own hand, he fell perfectly in the trench,” a law-enforcement official told the New York Post, and he survived.

After each of these incidents, New Yorkers recalibrated. Stay closer to the wall when waiting for a train. If someone is on fire, don’t just stand there. But, if someone is merely yelling, ignore him. If possible, move to another car.

And, if you see the N.Y.P.D. pull out firearms, duck.

These days, I take the A/C train, getting on at the Nostrand station, the same one that Dajuan Robinson entered without paying. It is not a great train station—smelly, a little chaotic—but the A is a great train. It comes frequently and regularly, there is usually plenty of seating, and it runs express. Living near the A train means never having to say you’re sorry (for being late).

Our kids’ school is at the Clinton-Washington C stop, which has seen better days. People like to use the station as a place to hang out. A few months ago, I saw a man extracting something from a vial with a syringe. One of his friends, seeing that there were children nearby, started yelling at him to stop. That did not help. I think my kids were more disturbed by the man yelling than by the one performing what looked like a science experiment.

The subway, Lieber keeps saying, is a microcosm of the city. What happens below is merely a reflection of what happens above. If we make progress on affordable housing and mental-health services, the subways will improve. Until we do that, the Governor could send the 82nd Airborne into the stations and nothing much would change. There are too many trains, too many stops, too many riders. Nowhere else are we pressed up against so many different people, at roughly two- to seven-minute intervals. And, according to one excellent data analysis, the average New Yorker might be slightly safer on the subway than she is on the city’s streets.

My favorite subway story took place a few years ago, on the S train in Brooklyn—kind of a dumb train, which runs three stops, from Prospect Park to Fulton Street in Bed-Stuy, and which would be so much more useful if it kept going north, to Williamsburg. We were on it with our then two-year-old, heading for the park, when a large, loud man entered the car with a boom box. “Yo!” he yelled. “Listen to this!” He started blasting “Shape of You,” by Ed Sheeran. It was, I’ll admit, a surprising song for him to have played. Every few bars, he would cry out “Yes!” He really loved the song, and he wanted to share it with his fellow New Yorkers. At Prospect Park, we all got out, without incident. ♦