‘The subways aren’t safe.” My trainer should know. Every workday he meets clients in one gym after another, across two islands and three boroughs. “People are jammed in, standing room. If you wait for the next train, they’re jammed too. Something always happens.” What happened today, I asked. “Guy coughed in another guy’s face, they got into it.”
My trainer remembers the bad old days of Day-Glo tags and dirt-dark grime. He even achieved a bit of fame when he pulled someone off the tracks and had to squeeze himself into the scoop of space below the lip of the platform so as not to be crushed by the inbound train. It took the transit police an uncomfortable while to move the train out and lift him up. But life belowground now is bad enough in its own way. Trouble first began during the pandemic with homeless lunatics. The city, he says, let them camp out in the subways, since there wasn’t space enough in the shelters to house them safely. Disorder ensued. He recalled turning back from an exit stairway at one station because the homeless couple who slept there had defecated in it. On his way back down he met a family of tourists about to head up. He directed them instead to the stairway at the other end of the platform. “Imagine seeing that. Welcome to New York!”
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