For my NYC snapshot I took a picture of the city as I was leaving for the day to return to Staten Island.  Every time I take the ferry to come to Manhattan I watch as the buildings grow out of the ground, and poke deep into the sky.  It is an experience that can never get old.  I wish the day we had to take the pictures had better weather to better depict the feelings created by the sight of the skyscrapers.  The way the background influences the overall mood of a photograph is astounding.  The grey sky and dull colors in this particular one establish a sense of dread that I never experience on my travel across the water.  Instead, I usually feel empowered, ready to take action and accomplish great things.  That’s the power the city can have on people.  It can fill them with dreams and hopes for the future, but maybe the grayness of this background and the exiting of the city could represent the dismissal of those same dreams and their crumbling to dust.            

I wanted to take a better picture, but I was so tired, I couldn’t focus my camera or angle it correctly so this was the best I could do in my state. But I had to really capture it since it was the first time I took the train late at night by myself.

This photo was taken 11:23pm on October 11 in the A train going downtown toward 42nd street Port Authority Bus Terminal. My closest friend, Stephanie, called me at 9:00pm on Saturday and said she was heading back to school the next morning and wanted to see me before she left. I hadn’t seen her all week because I had class, and her break was inconveniently placed right in the middle of the week. I really wanted to see her before she headed back to school, so I stuffed some clothes in my bag and was headed for the train station at around 10:00pm when my roommate Rebekah, ahem, warned me about the dangers of walking by myself at night. She also added a nice little story about gang activities in the area that one of our mutual friends had experienced. I was thoroughly frightened, so we texted a few people and only the one and only Pun answered! Yay for Chris! It was already around 11:30 by the time we started walking to the train station and I was exhausted. The walk to the A train on 125th street wasn’t bad at all that time of night, despite Rebekah’s warnings I got to the station safely.

I had to transfer from the A to the 1 and then the 7. I was hoping for a nice quiet empty subway ride home, but surprisingly there was a healthy amount of commuters still up at this time of night. The A train was filled with sleeping commuters, and all I could think of was Emma Lazarus’ poem “New Colossus” specifically the quote, “‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.'” But mostly the first part of the quote, haha. I was extremely tired, and even though there was a significant amount of people on the train, all you could hear was the braking of the train and the movement over the tracks. Everyone was sleeping, besides two girls who were texting or something. I can tell that most of them were just getting off work, they had their bags, work clothes on and looked exhausted. The city that never sleeps actually does sleep, on the trains, waiting for the bus, and anywhere it can. This city is filled with people that are trying to reach their dreams or just working hard to allow someone else to reach theirs. Just watching the amount of people getting on the train at 11:30pm, 12:00am, 1:00am in their work attire, sitting down and instantly falling asleep puts into perspective the reason why the city never sleeps.