The Art of New York's Subways

Feb. 3, 2005 — -- Editor's Note: New York's subway system, now more than 100 years old, is world-famous. Visitors are eager to venture underground to get a sense of the city, though some folks are a little scared of what they might find. But these days, the graffiti-strewn train cars are gone, crime is down, and art has returned to the underground.

Lorraine B. Diehl, the wife of ABC Radio entertainment correspondent Bill Diehl, writes about the rise and fall and rebirth of the city's subterranean transportation in "Subways: The Tracks That Built New York City," published by Clarkson Potter. The following is an excerpt explaining how things got so bad, and some of the good things you might find.

If you want to know anything about New York City, about how its citizens are coping with life in their metropolis, you'll have to ride the subway.

Down below the streets of the city, you'll get an instant reading of how New York City is doing. When former New York Times columnist Russell Baker compared his daily descent into the subway to a "torero confronting the bull," he was writing about the out-of-control time in the 1970s when youth gangs roamed the subways, seemingly impervious to the efforts of the Transit Authority police to keep them in check.

Crime in the subways had gotten so bad, in 1979, it spawned the Guardian Angels, a volunteer crime-fighting group led by the charismatic Curtis Sliwa. Donning red berets, they became a strong presence, occasionally making citizen's arrests.

What was happening in the subways was part of what was happening all over the city.

Back in 1904, the city that welcomed the first subway was solvent and optimistic. The new, privately operated system carried New Yorkers into the 20th century and even had a dash of glamour. Plaques and mosaics adorned each station to help identify the stations with "word pictures" for the growing immigrant population.

Gradually, however, those eye-catching plaques were made invisible by dirt and indifference. By the 1920s, the subway was simply an inexpensive, dependable means to get around. The five-cent fare couldn't be beat, but old subway cars got older and shabbier.

In 1940, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia hoped that the city takeover of the subway would streamline the system. To some extent it did, but that five-cent fare, in effect since 1904, remained frozen, and it was a real killer. It was only after World War II that it was raised, and by then, New Yorkers were leaving the city in droves, searching for the American Dream in suburbia.

During the 1960s, the city's financial problems brought with them a crippling twelve-day transit strike, and by the 1970s, New York was buried in a devastating fiscal crisis. If anyone had doubts that the city was in big trouble, one had only to ride a subway car. Graffiti was testimony to a city descending into anarchy.

However sociologists choose to interpret the need to "sign" on a public space, and however whimsical and colorful some of the scrawlings may have been, they were given and received as an act of defiance, a reflection of a city out of control.

As the Big Apple began to pull itself out of its financial hole and reclaim its status, attention was being paid to the world beneath the city streets and the subway system underwent a buffing up.

In 1985, the MTA began the ambitious Arts for Transit program. Established artists such as Owen Smith, Ralph Fasanella, Faith Ringgold, and Mark Gibian were commissioned to transform subway stations into art galleries and themed environments -- as the original subway architects had intended -- corresponding to the neighborhoods aboveground.

Nowhere is the transformation more apparent than at the 81st St. stop beneath the American Museum of Natural History. Once a drab station, it's now a wonderland. A galaxy of stars and planets occupies one entrance, while a subterranean world of fish and sea creatures inhabits the other.

At Times Square, artists Jacob Lawrence and Roy Lichtenstein have created vivid murals reflecting the vitality of the area. And at the Fourteenth Street station, Tom Otterness has brought whimsy to the area with his playful bronze pieces.

The days of dilapidated, graffiti-scarred subway cars are gone. Replacing the old rattling Redbirds are new sleek trains that are quieter, have air-bag suspension, ergonomically curved seats, and programmed messages recorded by dulcet-toned professionals to announce the stations. Cars are warm in winter and air conditioned in summer.

As for the rest of the subway system, if Russell Baker is still riding it, he is likely finding that for all of its problems, it's not such a bad place after all. In fact, like most New Yorkers, he may decide it's the best ride in town.

Excerpted with permission from "Subways: The Tracks That Built New York City," by Lorraine B. Diehl, published in 2004 by Clarkson Potter.