When a College is Also a Subway Station
By Nicholas Dagen Bloom
“What makes your program unique?” This question from a prospective urban planning student gave me pause. Like all planning programs, we at Hunter College offer a mix of classes, professors, studios and social vision. However, none of these features, I have to admit, are truly unique to us. Half in jest, I told him that, as far as I knew, we were the only planning program in the nation with a subway station in the basement. That oddity might not matter to all students, but it is a plus for a future urban planner interested in urban livability.
Having a subway station in the basement is not just a matter of demonstrating urbanistic bona fides; the college’s intimate connection to the subway system has long been a matter of supreme convenience and institutional priority. Hunter, after all, has been and remains an affordable “subway school” that has served as a dependable passage from immigrant neighborhoods to the middle class.
The school started on the Upper East Side in 1870 as a women’s college for training teachers. It was only in 1940, with the creation of its first highrise building, that the college linked itself directly to the subway. Administrators heralded a direct subway entrance as key to “students’ comfort and convenience … since almost half of them travel to school by subway.” When two brutalist towers opened in 1984, the expansion brought an updated entry, expanded stairwells and escalators, and a small open plaza.
Students at other universities may gripe about the lack of parking, but for our students, access to education rests on a functioning subway. When the 6 train is packed, an emergency cancels service, or the water cascades down the wall from heavy rains, their days have worsened. I can’t list the number of times my students have mentioned subway delays as a cause of lateness. Subway delays are also the proverbial “dog ate my homework” for chronically tardy students.
Beyond the occasional inconvenience, the subway entrance is a tremendous advantage for our student body, three-quarters of whom hail from the five boroughs. Direct access means a speedier commute for those hurrying from work to school. The integrated subway entrance can mean a safer journey home late at night. And, of course, thanks to the direct entrance, a drier or warmer trip on bad-weather days.
Because glass skyways link our buildings, once students enter, they can stay for the day. And with the subway station’s first elevators about to come online, the campus will now be accessible by transit to those in wheelchairs.
To be sure, the complexity of a vertical city reliant on escalators and elevators tests our maintenance staff, and the hallways are often crowded. Through it all, however, we handle tens of thousands of students, minimize carbon impact and serve as an affordable platform for social mobility. Without saying a word, we also educate a rising generation about the value of high-quality transit.
Nicholas Dagen Bloom is a professor of urban policy and planning at Hunter College. He is author of “The Great American Transit Disaster: A Century of Austerity, Auto-Centric Planning, and White Flight.”
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There’s Freedom in Mobility
By Brian Lehrer
I grew up in Bayside, Queens, where the subway doesn’t go. People there used to hold out hope that the Flushing line would be extended east, but it never happened, and that fantasy has long since disappeared.
My earliest memories of riding the subway are from our visits to my grandparents and my aunt in The Bronx. My Aunt Ceil would occasionally take me to Manhattan from there on the 2 or the 5 train from their stop at 174th Street. It seemed a great adventure when I was 5 years old.
Growing up in Bayside also meant that the first kind of mass transit I knew was the buses. From the time I could ride on my own, around age 11, the Q13 would take me to school. The Q28 would take me to Flushing to go shopping at record stores or to a doctor I saw there. I felt a kind of freedom that suburban kids don’t have because I didn’t have to drive to be independently mobile.
As I became a teenager, the bus connected me to the subway. In middle school, I was in a Saturday music program in Rego Park, for which I took the bus to the 7 train at Main Street, then transferred to the G at Roosevelt Avenue to get to the school where it happened. Seems crazy long to me today, but I liked traveling out of my neighborhood, making those transit connections, people-watching on the trains and eating snacks I bought along the way. (Anyone up for a Nedick’s hot dog?) By that age, I would also take the bus to Flushing and the subway one stop to see the Mets, without my parents having to get involved. It felt like living large to me.
I’ve lived most of my grown-up life in Manhattan, and the subways have remained a source of joy — commuting to a job or for any other reason — because I don’t have to drive to get where I’m going.
Driving to me is work. It takes constant focus. Riding the train is relaxing. It’s my auxiliary office, or the place I can chill and read for pleasure, or just think, as I go here and there. And though we all get frustrated by delays, the trains are usually pretty fast.
Living in Manhattan, my two kids grew up with the subways. Their early sense of the outside world came in part from the subway map we had at home, with its multicolored lines connecting neighborhood names they came to know. As a toddler, my younger one liked to take “subway adventures,” which meant we rode to another part of town and tried to come back by a different route, as he explored the possibilities of the map. And we enjoyed interacting on those trips, sitting side by side. For me, being a stroller dad beat being a car seat dad any day.
Usually, when we talk about the buses, subways and commuter rails in the news, it’s to assess their safety, their cleanliness, their accessibility, their state of repair. All those conversations are necessary. But we can also take a step back to not take the country’s most developed mass transit system for granted. We can stop to revel in how it offers human connection rather than isolation, and various kinds of freedoms — like those I’ve experienced throughout my life, and the freedom of easy mobility, which for many new or lower-income New Yorkers means a source of upward mobility — that places with less mass transit can’t offer.
Brian Lehrer is host of “The Brian Lehrer Show” on WNYC, New York Public Radio.
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A Public Space Like No Other
By Setha Low
In West Los Angeles, where I grew up, you drive to get anywhere. There are buses only along major streets, and with the lack of public transportation, much of everyday life is spent in cars. One outcome of an automobile culture is you rarely encounter strangers. When sprawl defines cities, walkable neighborhoods are rare and often homogeneous, and schools, churches, coffee shops, gyms and other third places are socially stratified. Public spaces are centers of villages and enclaves rather than part of an integrated city.
Segregation is obviously a problem in dense cities like New York, too, but the phenomenon is different, and that’s in no small part because of the subways. Imagine my anthropologist’s delight in getting on the F train from Brooklyn to Midtown Manhattan. I enter a “soundscape” of Spanish, Arabic, Hebrew, Russian and English with people from all walks of life sitting together quietly or attempting to speak to solve a problem, make room to sit, and say good morning or chat about the weather. In contrast to the individuated lifeworld created by the automobile, the subway functions as a mixing place, a space of sociality.
In public spaces, people encounter “others” — meaning others superficially or not superficially different from themselves who they would not normally come across — and in so doing transform them into recognized individuals. Even fleeting moments of visibility produce liberalizing qualities and increase flexible thinking, enhancing a sense of belonging and inclusion.
Contact, however, does not work alone. Without a public culture and loose rules of interaction, a public space does not feel comfortable or safe.
It is through encounters large and small, contact and face-to-face interaction, that riders define these rules and produce social life. I am always struck by how what we anthropologists call the affective atmosphere — for example, the difference in the feeling of Yankee Stadium when the team wins or loses — activates the space so that social interaction is more or less likely to occur.
Nobody likes tension, but by and large, groups and individuals become more comfortable through everyday frictions and adjustments that are the essence of urban living.
One example I witnessed: When a young woman speaking Chinese loudly with her girlfriend entered the subway car, a middle-aged white man made an obscene gesture, pulling his eyelids sideways and making a “singsong” voice. Immediately the two men on either side of me got up to give the girls their seats as I comforted them, telling them to ignore the rude man. The surrounding crowd pushed the offending man aside, away from the two girls.
Another: The woman next to me pointed with a big smile at a dancer as he sailed around the subway pole, then we both clapped excitedly — enjoying being together and watching such an amazing feat.
This is a public space like our parks and sidewalks and pedestrian plazas, but it’s also unlike any other in its capacity to cut across neighborhoods and bring strangers together.
Setha Low is the Distinguished Professor of Environmental Psychology, Anthropology, Earth and Environmental Sciences and Women’s Studies and director of the Public Space Research Group at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of “Why Public Space Matters.”
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Learning to Ride, Riding to Learn
By Kim Phillips-Fein
The F to the A to the 1. F at Bergen, A at Boro Hall, 1 at 59th Street up to 66th, then becoming part of the flow of teenagers going to LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts on Amsterdam Avenue behind Lincoln Center. That was my morning commute to high school in the early 1990s, from Boerum Hill in Brooklyn when the borough was still distinct from “the city.” I would ride the subway, cup of coffee splashing a little on my hand. Home might be those steps in reverse, or maybe the 1 to the 2 train and then walking home along Court Street.
The statistics tell that the city was dangerous then, much more so than now, with more than 2,000 homicides during my sophomore year. I never knew anything about it. For me, the subway was freedom. Being able to take the train to high school was a gift that opened the entire city, bringing me out of Brooklyn and to the Upper West Side and Greenwich Village, and bringing me together with classmates who came from all over the city, all five boroughs (yes, including Staten Island). The fantasy of the open road was nothing to me compared to the glories of the subway map. Occasionally I heard about kids who drove to school in the suburbs. I pitied them — having to rely always on their parents, and then, once they finally were able to go alone, once the state granted that treasured piece of paper, having to negotiate for the enormous clunky piece of metal. I hated being stuck in traffic.
On the subway, you could slip down into anonymity; you could keep your own thoughts, read, watch, draw, let yourself daydream without having always to focus on the lights and the signs. You could do your homework or scrawl in a journal and then you could get out, anywhere you wanted, and simply be someplace new.
When I was 15, no less than today, the subway seemed to embody the glory of the city: the way that these complex, communal structures support and make possible the most individual and most free of journeys, everyone relying on a common treasure to get to where we each, privately and individually, want to be.
Kim Phillips-Fein is Robert Gardiner-Kenneth T. Jackson Professor of History at Columbia University. She is author of “Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics” and “Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal.”
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Intersections and Professional Connections
By Tiffany-Ann Taylor
One of the best ideas of my career was born on a subway platform.
I’m an urban planner, and back in May of 2017, I was working for the City of New York. That year, the annual National Planning Conference was being hosted in New York City. Unfortunately, the conference did not reflect the kaleidoscope of people walking around this town. Instead, many of the panelists (and attendees) reflected the norm among planners — which is to say, they were predominantly white and male. I was tired of it. Why? Because I am a Black woman, a first-generation American, and I was exhausted by the constant underrepresentation of people who look like me on one of my profession’s biggest stages.
“Well, what are you going to do about it?” my then-fiance (now husband) asked me in answer to my grumbling. I took a second and replied, “I’m going to put on my own conference.” I had never created a conference or even hosted one. The local American Planning Association chapter already had its own conference, and most people in our profession didn’t think we needed another one. But actually, we did. It needed one with intersectionality and equity as its core mission, diverse viewpoints, vibrant presentations, engaging exhibits and safe spaces for discussion. Our colleagues needed a conference that was open to all and supported local, small, minority and women-owned businesses. This was the idea behind what became the Hindsight Conference.
So later that week, I told my colleague, Giovania “G” Tiarachristie, that we needed to meet up so I could share an important idea. But, G (who also worked as a planner for the City) and I couldn’t find a time to meet and decided we’d try again a few days later.
That night after work, I made my way to the downtown platform at the Wall Street station on the 2/3 line and waited for the train to approach. Once it stopped, the doors opened, and there stood G. Neither one of us could believe it, but looking back, I knew it was destiny. Right there on the platform, G and I took 10 minutes to discuss the idea. Although (rightfully) cautious about the lack of time, funds and staff, G said, “Let’s do it.”
The very first Hindsight Conference was held on Nov. 3, 2017 — just six months later. And while we were hopeful that some people would attend, we never expected to host over 400 people that day. Nor did we ever expect to run the conference for five years and, in the end, host more than 3,500 attendees and 500 speakers from across the U.S. (and a few other countries!). Forward-thinking, we had sessions on public restrooms for all and decentering whiteness in planning. We had conversations with food delivery workers held entirely in Mandarin, explored braids as the essence of urban design, and absorbed details about the connections between Black maternal health and city planning. The list goes on.
The final Hindsight Conference was held in November 2021. Three years later, I’m still asked to talk about all of it. Colleagues near and far tell me how much they miss it and how much they enjoyed the conversations it sparked. I could not be more proud. Some really good things happen in the subway system.
Tiffany-Ann Taylor is the vice president for transportation at the Regional Plan Association.
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Intersections and Professional Connections
By Midori Valdivia
One day in the hazy year after I gave birth to my child, I had a few hours free. I wasn’t sure of the destination, so I got on the subway. I took the Q to DeKalb Avenue and wandered into McNally Jackson’s new Brooklyn location. I treated myself to a book. Then, rather aimlessly, I headed on the uptown R into Manhattan.
Transitioning to motherhood was all-consuming in a way I couldn’t articulate at the time. To be able to have a few hours to experience the world outside — this was still the waning days of the pandemic — was wonderful. I sat on the nearly empty train and started reading my book. I noticed a man sitting diagonally across the way, in gym shorts and a gray shirt, also reading. He looked up and stared at me as the train moved slowly approaching a tunnel. I quickly returned my eyes to the page.
People sometimes like to talk on the subway, but I wasn’t really in the mood.
He spoke to me softly, haltingly. He excused himself and wondered how we could be reading the same author, at the same time on this one train.
He was reading “When Things Fall Apart” by Pema Chödrön, a Buddhist teacher. I held up the book I had just bought: “How We Live is How We Die,” also by Chödrön.
After a silence, he let out a sob. He told me he lost his wife just days ago. Unexpectedly. Sepsis.
He looked about my age at the time, in his 30s. I felt his guttural cry deeply. I was overcome with that fundamental human feeling that, regardless of strangerhood, we’re in it together. And on this day in New York City’s moving public plaza, before everything roared back, we shared one author and one moment. He asked if I lost something too.
“I am in a transition — motherhood.” A beginning. He nodded as tears ran down his face.
I moved to his side of the train and asked about his wife. He spoke lovingly of her. She was still with us on this train. And in the next moment, reality hit. He said he didn’t know what to do with himself. I asked about family. He has a dog. He wasn’t sure how he could go on.
I gave him my book, full of profound lessons on how to move through endings and beginnings. I told him it was meant for him more than it was for me.
We gave each other a hug as the train moved through the Montague Tunnel. Riders have moved through this tunnel, with their unspoken pain and joys, for 100 years. Some share it with others, some just holding on for dear life.
Midori Valdivia is a transport advisor. She serves on the boards of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Regional Plan Association.