Entering a subway station with no intention of boarding a train or going any place is a ghostly feeling. I feel like an intruder. It would not saurprise me if municipal ordinances forbidding this behaviour exist. But since getting an infinite MetroCard a few days ago I’ve been getting my money’s worth, entering subway stations just to explore, riding buses one or two stops when they happen to stop in tandem with my path. I feel like a radio left playing in an abandoned room or house. I thought of that expression while looking through old pictures of my mother and father. Those lives seem silent in photographs but their sounds must play on somewhere. New York feels continuous with the infinite MetroCard. The stations seem different when contemplated in their permanence, not in their transient functionality. Trains arrive and I do not board, feeling conspicuous for it but getting used to it the more I do it. There is good music underground, as any straphanger knows, but most people’s exposure to the performers is limited. I can sit and listen to a few songs, as could any traveler, but it seems to make more sense under the shroud of the infinite metrocard.
I am at a rarest of places, a nearly empty Starbucks. I am even hogging 2 seats with no fear of altercation.
I’ve been documenting the depressing state of subway payphones. Most stations now have no working phones, and those that appear to work will sound a dial tone and accept your coins and even connect the call but unfortunately the party you are calling cannot hear you. The only subways stations where one could reasonably expect find a working payphone are the big hubs of Grand Central and Penn Station, but even larger stations like the 53rd Street E/M/6 station are surprisingly dial-tone free. I did find one working phone at that station. The remaining dozen or so phones are just ugly ghosts, their numbers scrawled on their facade with permanent ink. The complete abdication of responsibility for public telephones in the city’s underground is surprising until you remember that money is the only factor in whether a phone is maintained or let to languish. It’s unfortunate that the city can’t find the relatively meager sum it would need to take over the business as a public utility.
