Subway

“ The Subway does something curious to faces. It seems to drain all life out of them; it strips from them their defensive masks and exposes the deep and expressive scars of existence. A secret{160} and hidden soul comes out in each Subway face. But Alyse averted her eyes.
“Dear me,” she sighed, “how dull they are! Isn’t there any beauty left in the world?”
Her father and his chum, Wally, were just ahead of her as she came up from the Subway depths. They were wending their way to their respective homes, having come up from downtown together, as was their invariable custom. ”

“ He gathered that it would take at least an hour to mend the mishap, perhaps even longer, and he was not minded to wait.
"I'll walk across yonder and catch the subway," he said. "You mend the car and bring it downtown when you get it mended."
At its farthest point north, the Broadway subway, belying its name, emerges from the earth and becomes an elevated structure, rearing high above the ground. Its northernmost station stands aloft, butt-ended and pierced [73] with many windows, like a ferry-boat cabin set up on stilts. ”

“ Descending a few steps, and emerging into a tunnelled incline, the perspiring pedestrian quickly found that here, if anywhere, was a refuge from the heat, the coolest place in London, and that it was well worth while, on the pretence of urgent business across the water, to pay twopence each way, merely to drink in the refreshing air wafted backwards and forwards along subway, platform, and tube. ”

“ Directly underneath your comfortable seats in this luxurious car pass the swift conveyances of the subway, forming the cheapest entrance into the great department stores. By means of this superb subterranean passageway ocean steamers arrive and depart daily from all ports of the globe. ”

“ The subway passenger purchases a nickel's worth of speed and he must take with it a nickel's worth of democracy.
Perhaps it is the youthful romanticism of America which makes our subways so much more exciting than those of Europe. The Englishman is too cautious and too conservative to trust himself away from the earth's surface more than two minutes at a time. So the trains that run through the London tube are tame, cowardly things. They timidly run underground for half a mile or so and pop their heads out into the air and sunlight or fog at every station. ”

“ Soothing—that’s what they are, these advertising pictures. They soften the underground torment of travel in the Subway, they take the place of the scenery which beguiles the tedium of ordinary travel, and at least they are, as a rule, more interesting to contemplate than the people in the opposite seat. ”

“ But up on the airy decking of the Brooklyn Bridge, where we repaired with G—— W—— for a brief stroll, the afternoon seemed mild and tranquil. It is a mistake to assume that the open spaces are the windier. The subway is New York's home of Æolus, and most of the gusts that buffet us on the streets are merely hastening round a corner in search of the nearest subway entrance so that they can get down there where they feel they belong. Up on the bridge it was plain to perceive that the March sunshine had elements of strength. ”

“ But simplicity in the subway? Guileless transparency of any sort? Spirituality? Mockery!
The face he never saw became an obsession with Mr. Neal. He hunted for it in various parts of the city. He tried the Broadway line of the subway where the faces are notably pleasanter, more prosperous, and smugger. But neither there nor about the Universities on Morningside Heights and on the banks of the Harlem, nor in Brooklyn, nor anywhere he looked, did he find the face he sought. He could always see it when he closed his eyes. ”

“ Strength, utility, and convenience have not alone been considered, but all parts of the railroad structures and equipment, stations, power house, and electrical sub-stations have been designed and constructed with a view to the beauty of their appearance, as well as to their efficiency.
The completion of the subway marks the solution of a problem which for over thirty years baffled the people of New York City, in spite of the best efforts of many of its foremost citizens. ”

“ Nailed against a fine and ancient tree, in the midst of a desolate waste, I saw a board with these words: "A new Subway station will be erected on this corner." There are legendary people who have eyes to see the grass growing. I have seen New York growing. ”

“ Of course, the subway has its incidental charms—its gay fresco of advertisements, for instance, and its faint mysterious thunder when it runs near the surface of the street on which we stand. But its chief service to man—perhaps its reason for existence—is that it gives him adventure. In this adventure he meets the spirit of faith and the spirit of democracy, which is an aspect of charity. ”

“ In the eye of one commuter, the 12:50 Saturday Only is the most exciting train of all. What a gay, heavily-bundled, and loquacious crowd it is that gathers by the gate at the Atlantic Avenue terminal. There is a holiday spirit among the throng, which pants a little after the battle down and up those steps leading from the subway. (What a fine sight, incidentally, is the stag-like stout man who always leaps from the train first and speeds scuddingly along the platform, to reach the stairs before any one else.) Here is the man who always carries a blue cardboard box full of chicks. ”

“ Then comes our substitute for your Subway, and street-car system generally. In London you will notice that there are two kinds of Subway—the so-called Underground, or shallow transit, and the deep Tubes. The system is so complicated, owing to the shape of London, that it has been found impossible to have a one-price ticket such as prevails everywhere in the United States.
The Underground is the oldest underground railroad in the world. ”

“ The engineers had done their work well, made a great thought in steel and cement. And then the business men and bureaucrats had made the great thought a curse. There was in the Subway all the romance which story-telling youth goes seeking: trains crammed with an inconceivable complexity of people—marquises of the Holy Roman Empire, Jewish factory hands, speculators from Wyoming, Iowa dairymen, quarreling Italian lovers, with their dramatic tales, their flux of every human emotion, under the city mask. ”

“ Elevated railways and a freight subway have been built in recent years and have somewhat relieved the crowded condition of the streets. This subway, opened in 1905, connects with all the leading business and freight houses, and carries coal, ashes, garbage, luggage, and heavy materials of every kind to and from them. ”

“ This railway—the City and Southwark Subway—is not opened at the time of writing, but it is rapidly approaching completion, and great hopes are entertained that it will be the pioneer of a new system of railways which will prove as great a convenience as those already in existence in the metropolis. ”

“ The best method of getting to the Highfield is by the Subway. To see the Subway in its most characteristic mood one must travel on it during the rush-hour, when its patrons are packed into the carriages in one solid jam by muscular guards and policemen, shoving in a manner reminiscent of a Rugby football scrum. When Psmith and Billy entered it on the Friday evening, it was comparatively empty. ”

“ Thence, if it is late afternoon, one may walk back to City Hall Park and encounter and experience the convergent stream of clerks and workers making for the bridge, mark it grow denser and denser, until at last they come near choking even the broad approaches of the giant duct, until the congested multitudes jostle and fight for a way. They arrive marching afoot by every street in endless procession; crammed trolley-cars disgorge them; the Subway pours them out.... ”

“ Then, after a run of 61⁄2 miles from Shepherd’s Bush in twenty-four minutes, the Central “early workmen” pulled up at the Bank terminus at a platform resembling the others all along the line.
Mrs. Rosamond went up in a big lift, not to the surface as she expected, but found herself landed in a broad asphalted, bewildering subway lined with white bricks. ”

“ It was February weather, anyway, and in an echoing enough place that I found him—the subway of one of the Metropolitan stations. He'd probably forgotten the echoes when he'd taken the train; but, of course, the railway folk won't let a man who happens to dislike echoes go wandering across the metals where he likes. ”

“ Conversation on the Subway is impossible. The ingenious gentlemen who constructed it started with the object of making it noisy. Not ordinarily noisy, like a ton of coal falling on to a sheet of tin, but really noisy. ”

“ Some fifteen minutes afterward, he left the subway station and trudged along the rapidly piling drifts, through the cross street and up the avenue a block or two, to the expensive and exclusive Burlingham Club. ”

“ FOUR-TRACK SUBWAY—SHOWING CROSS-OVER SOUTH OF 18TH STREET STATION
In front of the waterproofing, immediately behind the steel columns, are the systems of terra-cotta ducts in which the electric cables are placed. ”

“ We find a few places that you might conceivably call caves, but they’ve been well picked over for arrowheads, if there ever were any. That’s the trouble in the city: anytime you have an idea, you find out a million other people had the same idea first. Along in mid-afternoon, we drift down toward the subway and get cokes and ice cream before we start back.
I don’t really feel like going home yet, so I think a minute and study the subway map inside the car. “Hey, as long as we’re on the subway anyway, we could go on down to Cortlandt Street to the Army-Navy surplus store. ”

“ If the city government of New York had at its head a man “with a beard on his chin,” he could find a way to solve this Subway problem and all kindred problems within a few weeks, and in such a manner that it would never be presented again. ”

“ This is a song that I wrote after I first came to Cambridge in 1943. When I first took the subway ride from Cambridge into Boston, I noticed that the subway stations on the line had this interesting feature. ”

“ The subway is illuminated electrically, but a considerable amount of natural light is also obtained, especially at the stations; and Captain Piper, deputy of the New York Police, when on a visit to London last February, discussing the question of ventilation in tube railways, gave it as his opinion that the freshest air he had “struck” in an underground railway was at Boston. “The air,” he said, “is excellent.”
The subway is, of course, perfectly clean, smokeless, and comparatively quiet; neither in the streets can any noise be heard from the cars that are continually passing close beneath. ”

“ Drop one cent in the slot, take the minute package that shoots out into the pan, start chewing on the fragrant chicle, and sit in a subway car opposite other masticating engines, and you will see other hapless passengers run from the car at the next station and secure a similar package to that your cent brought forth. Such is the power of suggestion on a subway. The vaccination always takes!”
As Zan read, the audience had tittered, but when she concluded and sat down the younger contingent laughed outright and “How’ed!” Then Miss Miller stood up. ”

“ This was the initial stage of the present well-known railway.{17}
At the outset, three points had to be considered. How was the subway to be constructed? What motive power should be employed? And how was the deep level to be reached by the passengers? A subway under the Thames was no novelty. The directors of the new line were not the “first that ever burst into that silent sea” of mud and gravel at the bottom of the swift-flowing river. Brunel had been long before them with his costly Thames Tunnel, and Barlow had years ago laid upon its oozy bed the Tower Subway of iron. ”

“ Subway were originally built by the railway company in 1901. Today the total transportation system includes more than 500 miles of line of which 37 miles are subway and elevated tracks. The population served in the district of more than 92 square miles is considerably over a million people and the number of revenue passengers carried, approximates 350,000,000 per year. Statistics are not available as to the passengers carried on the Rapid Transit lines. ”

“ I have begun to take delight in travelling by the Subway. People there don’t pose. They are in too great a hurry to put on masks. Extraordinary how impressive breeding is when it is united with good clothes. The [58] train can be so full that there is often a double row extending from one end of the car to the other, hanging on to the round leather rings with coarse, toil-worn, or delicate kid-gloved hands. Some one always makes room for me, but I also take my time to form the desired expression on my face. To-day a poor woman sat next to me with two or three little wreaths on her lap. ”

“ As early as 1908, the subway was continued and carried under the East River to Brooklyn. Several tubes have since been built under the Hudson, connecting Manhattan with the New Jersey shore. To-day New York is building many miles of new subway under various parts of the city as well as under the Harlem and East rivers. Carrying passengers under water has proved as great a success as carrying them underground.
BROOKLYN BRIDGE
Over and above all these means of rapid transit, Greater New York has at its service ten of America's great railroads. ”

“ Five types of construction have been employed in building the road: (1) the typical subway near the surface with flat roof and "I" beams for the roof and sides, supported between tracks with steel bulb-angle columns used on about 10.6 miles or 52.2 per cent. of the road; (2) flat roof typical subway of reënforced concrete construction supported between the tracks by steel bulb-angle columns, used for a short distance on Lenox Avenue and on the Brooklyn portion of the Brooklyn Extension, also on the Battery Park loop; (3) concrete lined tunnel used on about 4.6 miles or 23 per cent. ”