By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog
During
winters, I would take the F train to school and over summer I would
ride it to Coney Island until I could tell which subway station I was
approaching by the color of the wall tiles. I would take a breath as the
subway train left the dark tunnels, rails sparking and the lights
occasionally flickering out, to ascend to the ‘high line’ overlooking
McDonald Avenue.
Coney Island-Stillwell Av was the last stop if
it was summer or I was playing hooky on a winter beach day. It was also
the last stop for Debrina Kawam, a homeless woman, who was sleeping on
the train when she was set on fire by a Guatemalan migrant on her last
Sunday morning.
Kawam had likely been avoiding the homeless
shelters after they were overrun with violent migrants, but it did her
no good. The last we saw of her, she was standing and burning, while
people walked by or filmed with their phones at the last stop in view of
the cold seaside air.
The murder on the F train took place weeks
after Daniel Penny, a Marine Corps veteran, had been ‘let off’ after
heroically intervening to stop a career maniac, who previously assaulted
a number of elderly women with no consequences, restraining him on a
Brooklyn bound F train.
The F train is no worse than any other
subway line, traveling from Jamaica, Queens to Coney Island, letting you
go from JFK Airport right to the beach (or the other way around) but it
is the second longest subway route after the A train made famous by
Duke Ellington. The F train did not exist yet and in any case ducks out
via Roosevelt Island to Queens long before it reaches Harlem or
Ellington’s home in Washington Heights which was then reachable by the A
train.
The 27 mile length of the route makes the F train a
magnet for homeless, scam artists, subway performers and assorted
crazies who know that they can enjoy a ride of over an hour and a half
(on a good day) with scenic views, three boroughs and a selection of
comfortable seats, if you like orange and yellow buckets, with room to
stretch out your feet from a window seat.
There was a time when
subway personnel walked through the cars, warning anyone putting their
feet up, but these days they have far bigger problems, not just
old-fashioned pickpockets and muggers, but random stabbings, serial
sexual predators who go in and out of the system, and crazies who push
waiting riders onto the tracks when they get too close to the yellow
line.
On New Year’s Eve, a man was pushed in front of a subway
train. He somehow survived the experience with a broken skull. Subway
stabbings have become so routine that there were two on New Year’s Day
within 20 minutes. The next day an MTA employee was stabbed in the
armpit. The only thing still distinguishing today’s subways from the
worst days of the seventies and eighties is the lack of car-to-car
graffiti that had become typical in that area.
The subway was
always a metaphor for New York City. Its trains rushing between the
depths of tunnels and the heights overlooking busy streets linked a
bewildering city into one whole. Over a hundred years ago, Joyce Kilmer
sketched the subway as a collection of “tired clerks, pale girls, street
cleaners, business men, boys, priests and harlots, drunkards, students,
thieves” thundering “through the dark”, but the balance of power has
shifted away from the clerks, girls, boys and business men, over to the
drunkards, thieves, along with the killers and the monsters.
The
trouble with the subway, as with the city, is that some take it to go
somewhere else, while others use it to take advantage of others. Overrun
by criminals, homeless and migrants, the subway is no longer a
transportation system, but a colony with a permanent population who form
a gauntlet that the rest of us have to run in order to get to anywhere
else in the city.
Measures like congestion pricing squeeze more
people into a violent and dangerous system, but what makes it violent
and dangerous is that it all too well reflects a fallen city. The
fundamental difference between the city and all other forms of living is
density. In towns and villages, the proportion of private space to
public space is weighted toward the individual, but cities are all
collective public spaces with a few small stacked private spaces in
which we live.
Cities are built by utopians but populated by
dystopias. The difference lies in the society. Unlike less dense
communities, cities offer little refuge or escape from public spaces
into private ones. New York City’s apartments are small even at their
most expansive price points and the amount of single family housing
continues to drop even assuming that anyone could afford a home.
A
social breakdown in a city is felt immediately. When I returned during
the pandemic, I could feel the changes in the tension in the air that
told me nowhere in the city was safe anymore.
The subway, at its
best a means of connecting the city’s varied neighborhoods that is
unrivaled in the country and perhaps the world (although Londoners and
Parisians may disagree) is wonderful for rapidly navigating the city’s
cultural circulatory system, but when a society is poisoned, that same
system just as rapidly spreads the poison everywhere that it can reach.
The
New York City subway is why Los Angeles and other cities long resisted
rapid public transportation, not just because of the cost, but to keep
the bad elements from spreading. While other cities can gate off the
worst of the problem, retreat to the suburbs and hope that tolls and the
cost of car ownership can keep roaming maniacs at bay, there is no such
defense here.
Like a heroin shot to the veins, whatever is in
the city hits its subways first. Drugs, violence, terror, pain and fear
travel along the lines. They roam the byzantine interiors of stations
left over from the convoluted merging of the city’s different systems,
they live in them and kill in them. The subway is a metaphor for the
city. And the city is very, very sick.
If you doubt that, take the A train or the F train. Just listen, look and watch your back.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.
No comments:
Post a Comment