THE ARTS IN NEW YORK CITY Fall 2017 | Baruch College | Macaulay Honors

During the course of my Junior year of high school, I interned at the Intrepid Sea Air and Space Museum, where one of the things that we were taught was the importance of inclusivity in New York City. This involved a lot of things, however one of the most memorable things to note was when we looked at subway maps from 2016, and just a few years prior. Something we discovered after a while was the vast increase in handicap accessible stations over just about a decade or two, based on the social needs and demand of these stations to become handicap accessible.

My obsession with the subway system is one that has existed since I was a child and rode the one train for the first time on my way to the Museum of Natural History. So of course, I utilized the nifty link that had so many different subway line schematics since the subway ever existed, and I wanted to show my version of social change through that. I looked at a map from 1904, of the Inter-borough Rapid Transit, and this map, pictured below, was very interesting to me as an art piece. The map showed only the subway line, and the stops the train would make, and only drew in a very minimal amount of the surrounding streets or landmarks. This made me jump to the idea that I wanted to showcase, which was that our transit system has and always will only reflect the needs of the people. In this time period, you can tell from looking that this map that the stops reflected not an equal distance between stops but a direct route to the most populated areas (14^th st, 23^rd st, 42^nd st twice). The areas where people lived were obviously more densely inhabited downtown, and towards the inner part of Manhattan. These needs obviously grew through the ages, and you can see in the 1939 subway map, and then later again in the 1967 subway map, the significant increases to the amount of lines, stops, and extensions to routes that had to be made. Even if you were unaware of the immigration boom and the massive flux in population density, you would be able to extrapolate that information just by looking at these maps.

1904 Line

1939 Line Map

1967 Line Map

2010 Line Map

The fact that we had trains to commute throughout each borough showed that New York City has always been a very high paced society, and the changed to the subway system over the years has been unlike any other metropolis in the world. I believe the structure of the subway lines was dependent on where people had settled, aka centralizing on Broadway and eventually scattering outwards, and later on dictated the neighborhoods we have now. In our current society, the areas that had once been simply the most populated, are now the major shopping or business hubs that our city is known for. Around the world, 42^nd street (Times Square) is one of the most recognizable streets to anyone, and that is partially because of our subway system allowing the people to commute there and back almost instantly.

The changes to our subway system were made to reflect our needs, such as visiting relatives from one area of the city or another, getting to work if you lived in Harlem and needed to get to Wall Street, or just didn’t have the cash to hail a cab. The subway reflects the gritty, high paced (run for your train or be stuck there), trying to hustle and save a few bucks, attitude that New Yorkers are known for! Overall, I feel as though the subway is a NYC staple, and comparing the past with our current subway system only proves that we had created something worth improving on, and making better every chance we possibly could, because it worked for us!

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 12th, 2017 at 10:32 am and is filed under Blog #10. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.