I ♥️ NY’s Subway
Not even COVID will make me abandon it
This spring I spent two weeks having an affair with an electric car. But I have come to my senses and returned to my family: the letters and numbers of the New York City Subway. Why such loyalty to a beat-up old sprawl of train and track, a system that has lost two thirds of its riders since the pandemic tore the city apart? Because I owe the subway for my child’s earliest education and the basis for the bond we formed as father and son.
Unlike undergrounds in most cities, Manhattan’s system is iconic, instructional and oddly child friendly. You need only know that the “1–2–3” line is red and that the “4–5–6” is green and that these numbers may take you up or down the island of Manhattan. Letter-wise things are less clear. Why are A’s, C’s, and E’s blue and F’s, B’s, and D’s orange? To the adult this doesn’t quite make sense. For a child it is sense incarnate.
As a freelancer with a working partner, the task of whiling away afternoons often fell on my shoulders. When my son was still small I would strap him in a carrier facing out at exactly the height of the subway map. Even before he could read I sensed him staring at it, parsing red from green. Soon he began making specific destination requests.
