How Riding the Subway as a Kid Changed the Way I See the World

Conor here: A paper last year from the Minneapolis Fed showed how income segregation in the US has been increasing for 40 years: Over the last 40 years US cities have experienced a profound transformation in their socio -economic structure: poor and rich families have become increasingly spatially separated over time. As noted by Massey et al. (2009), this is a new phenomenon in US cities, which historically were segregated predominantly on the basis of race. During the last third of the twentieth century, the United States has moved toward a new regime of residential segregation characterized by decreasing racial-ethnic segregation and rising income segregation. Such a shift has taken place at the same time as a steady increase in income inequality. And from the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality, a slightly dated chart (with trends that have only grown since) showing how an increasing number of Americans live in neighborhoods that are either very poor or very rich: By Sarena Neyman, who writes a syndicated column for PeaceVoice and is a Massachusetts grant writer. Originally published at Common Dreams. It was 1974. The Bronx was burning. Abandoned cars littered the streets, and New York City teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. I’m still surprised my overprotective Holocaust-survivor parents let their preteen daughter ride the subway to school every day, but somehow they did. For five years—from eighth grade through high school—I took the No. 5 Dyre Avenue train from our apartment in the Pelham Parkway neighborhood of the Bronx to my Jewish day school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The commute was nearly an hour each way and always coincided with rush hour. Mornings weren’t so bad; I lived near the beginning of the line and could usually get a seat. But heading home, the 86th Street platform was packed five to eight people deep. When it was my turn to board, I would throw my entire body weight onto the person in front of me, as the person behind me did the same. We all pushed forward together, forcing ourselves into an already crammed car, as more people tried to pack in behind us. Once the doors closed, we stood packed together in a dense sea of bodies. When the train lurched, the entire crowd swayed as one. Usually, I breathed through my mouth to avoid the smell of sweat and bad breath. I tried to pull away from a hand on my behind that might have been accidental, but probably was not. I remember thinking I was too young for this. At the time, I hated riding on the subway. But more than 50 years later, I’m grateful for that commute—for the way it forced a visceral reminder of our shared humanity. Now, like three-quarters of Americans, I go everywhere by car. It’s faster and more convenient but I never see my fellow travelers—only their vehicles speeding past on the highway. And while I don’t miss the discomfort of the subway, I feel more cut off from other people’s lives. When you don’t see people, you know them less. When entire groups remain unseen it becomes easier to turn them into abstraction—to fear them, dismiss them, or vilify them. It’s much harder to do that when you’ve stood shoulder to shoulder with someone, both of you grasping the pole as the train jolts you from side to side. These were the days before smart phones or even portable music players. There was little to distract me from just looking and listening to the people around me. For two hours a day, I heard people speaking Spanish. I absorbed its rhythms long before I understood the words. Years later, when I finally learned the language, I picked it up quickly. The subway exposed me to a depth of poverty I hadn’t seen in my own working-class Jewish neighborhood. I saw people asleep on the seats, curled around garbage bags that held everything they owned. There was a young man with no legs or lower torso who moved through the cars on a wheeled platform, collecting money. I watched him cross the treacherous gaps between cars as the train rattled and swayed. The subway also showed me where people lived. Unlike highways, which are designed to bypass neighborhoods, the elevated train trestle cuts straight through them. The No. 5 ran through the South Bronx at a time when more than 80% of buildings had burned or been abandoned. On dark winter evenings, we passed through blocks of hollowed-out shells, with the occasional occupied apartment. From the train I could see into people’s living rooms, glowing blue from the television. As a teenager, I didn’t know much about redlining, disinvestment, or the policies that had helped create those conditions. I only knew that children my age lived there and I wondered what it was like to grow up in what felt like a war zone. There are, of course, other ways to encounter difference. My husband, a nurse in one of the poorest communities in Massachusetts, has cared for people from all walks of life. But that’s a different kind of interaction. People meet him when they’re sick, in pain, or in crisis. When you commute, you’re simply sharing space. But not all forms of transportation create the same kind of shared space. Recently, riding the Amtrak train home from Philadelphia, I watched miles of rundown brick rowhouses slide past the window. Some were boarded up. Inside the train, however, the conversations I overheard were about road races in Cancun and the best spin classes in Manhattan. The passengers’ lives appeared far removed from the neighborhoods we were passing through. Having last lived in a city decades ago, my rural life is now quieter, more controlled. I move from one place to another sealed inside a car. It’s comfortable and efficient. But it’s made my life smaller. It’s made it possible to live a life where one rarely sees anyone outside one’s own orbit. How can that not affect one’s ability to empathize—if your neighbors, coworkers, and classmates all reflect some version of yourself? The more choices we have about how we travel or whether we go to private schools or fancy gyms, the easier it becomes to spend our lives among people much like ourselves. Distance makes it easier to dehumanize. Which is not to say that riding the No. 5 Dyre Avenue made me a kinder person. I still judge people; I could be nicer and more patient. But the commute gave shape and texture to lives I might otherwise reduce to stereotypes. Day after day, it reminded me that everyone, just like me, was simply trying to get home. Good thoughtful piece. Kids who use transit do have more of a grip on reality and community. I always felt sorry for kids whisked away from Wrigley Field in a car in the 8th inning ‘to beat the traffic’. Solo travel of any kind will place you in amongst a vast array of people, cultures, and problems, too. I have often thought it’s sad that many of our elected leaders are terribly proud to have lived their whole lives in one spot, 4th generation whatever, and have no rounded perspective on anything. Older people who hunker down in their homes, bragging about ordering all their needs off Amazon, are detaching from life and reality, and their ‘fellow man’ becomes a dead concept. To me, one straightforward explanation for this is that, since the 1980s, housing has become a manufactured product in the US and most is conceived, financed, permitted, constructed, marketed, and sold by large(ish) corporations who have a business plan to sell a particular housing development to a particular demographic, one that has a certain income range. This will have the obvious result that all the housing in a particular tract of land, which can be quite large, is owned by people of pretty much the same socioeconomic class, one that is actively sought after by the company that designs a particular set of houses. Hard to get more segregated than this. An additional factor may have to do with this: In my home state of California, e.g., there have been occasional efforts to try to introduce low-income housing into these manufactured housing tracts, so that people with less money will have more access to affordable housing and so the neighborhoods will be more socioeconomically diverse. These efforts have been strenuously resisted, not just by the housing provider (as one might expect), but also by the people who have already bought housing in the same area. Evidently, homeowners don’t want less affluent people living near them. So it seems like economic segregation is something that is wired into us to some extent. Just to add, a neighbourhood can be poor but have upbeat moods, sense of purpose or pride, or not, and the subway is a good way to get a read on that. Once upon a time I worked in the fashion district of Toronto. There were (are?) brutal sweat shops where the documented or not would be locked into rooms, with repeated ordinance and labour violations involving emergency exits being locked, no washrooms or break rooms, etc. We would see the workers coming and going, utterly broken, physically, spiritually, devoid of hope, dejected. Fast forward to now, they are loud, proud, visibly happy, greeting each other each day like family, huge amounts of love, sense of belonging and hope, and they obviously look forward to their workday, though I’m sure their pay is probably not great, their conditions are much improved. I blame DEI but also that brief period where clothing companies were shamed about their labour practices. My point is these are something somethings about neighbourhoods that you can only witness by being there, alongside it, seeing such things oneself. Such poignant memories. Our 1950s apartment was 10 blocks from Harlem on the upper west side of Manhattan. Elementary school was east side, 60s. Two separate routes required with a transfer between them. So, at 8 years old my mom takes me on this journey two days in a row. She then looks at me and says “Get it?”: I did. (Today she would be arrested for child abuse notwithstanding the “Free Range Kids” idea.) Yes, in the very efficient subways or buses of that time you got to know all of New York City. Everyone was equal. And a monthly school pass was one dollar. My most interesting experiment was when one day–I must have been 9 or 10–I looked at the top of the first subway car. “Coney Island” was spelled out as the terminus. Hmmm, Coney Island, Coney Island–I’d heard a lot about it, but had never been. So, school pass in hand I rode the train to the end. It was January, cold. Walked up the steps to look at a pretty deserted place, and thought to myself, “Coney Island, not much’. By the time I got back to our apartment my mom was almost frantic. “WHERE were you?!” You know my reply. Fun days. Lovely piece, and comments. We need more of this. How true that cars deepen the isolation. Screens, even more. Lived in Philly all through my 30’s, never owned a car, spent lotsa time on trains subways, busses, and trolleys (still running when I was there!). Moved to less urban area at age 40, got a car, and gained 20 lbs (sitting in car rather than running for busses!). Occasionally riding Amtrak since before it was Amtrak. Only subway experience in NYC was going into the city to check out Occupy Wall Street. Occupy was fun (lotsa good energy, young “creatives” being creative, etc) but it was obvious to me that they weren’t going to Change The World. The people who really make a difference – the people who keep the world running – were the ones we saw on the subway, going to & from work, home, shopping, etc. Long-distance trains still offer a wonderful but jarringly varied view of our country. Between cities, you often get gorgeous vistas, but in most cities, the rails run through the dirtiest industrial and poorest residential areas. Trains generally run more slowly there (curving around obstacles torn down decades ago?), so you have time to read old factory names and try to decipher the colorful tagging on abandoned boxcars and crumbling buildings. Bonus educational note: I recall riding Amtrak in mid-80’s, realizing that it was the first time I’d had a Black Conductor ask for my ticket. Learned later that the Rail Unions had been very segregated – Engineers (and Conductors) were white, Porters (and food-service workers) were black, until some time in the 1970’s. i grew up in the woods(mostly quite literally, as i learned by age 5 that it was a good way to avoid my folks and their bullshit), in what is now far exurban greater houston…but was then still piney woods. railroad came along the edge of out far out neighborhood…and had a sidetrack there, where trains would slow down and pass each other. so i, of course, was riding those slow moving trains by age 11. eventually all the neighborhood boys(all younger than me) were doing it, as well.(i can go on and on about all that, but will stick to a particular event that is germane to this art). so one morning…i was prolly 12…because dad was still at home…and was at the tracks before dawn, riding a slow moving houston-bound freight. i was on the lil porch thing at either end of a gran car. and just as i got close to the sand pile where we usually jumped off, there was dad, heading to work, waiting for the train to pass…so i had to hide. couldnt exit the train as i usually did. passed the crossing where dad was, but the train was already moving too fast to dismount. so i rode that thing all the way into houston. ended up the Fifth Ward(i think, that system always confused me)…black impoverished neighborhood next to the big railryards east of downtown. train finally stopped, and i got off…chased out of the yard by yelling trainmen, and walked to the nearest payphone(remember those?)…past a million scary black men, hanging around on street corners…and called my dad’s office collect. he was, of course, pissed…but apparently never said a word to mom. but the point of this…i, too, passed slowly through miles and miles of trailerparks and shit neighborhoods…looking into backyards of obviously po folks…and the further i went south, the poorer and darker the people. and at the end of the ride..the poorest people, yet. young black men standing around on street corners with paper sacks at 9:30am on a monday. nothing to do. weird thing is that dad, when he pulled up to collect me seemed far more scared than i was of those environs. but it had a large effect on me. made me look at the people i lived around in a different light…lotsa poverty in those pineywoods, back then. especially in the black neighborhood up the road. I’d known those folks forever…rode the same rural school bus…and the elder of the community was my grandad’s best friend…had a bbq joint together at that intersection. but it was only after that trainride that i realised the poverty and crazy abuse those folks lived with every day. by the time i was 18 and off on the road, for reals, i had found that i much prefer hanging out with the underclass than the upper…hands down…even though i am better (self) educated than 90% of them.(hell, i couldnt show my smarts among “my own” upper middle class peeps, either,lol) the authenticity and morality and honesty(good and bad) mattered to me. and still does. Reading this while riding the commuter rail home from Boston. Not quite the craziness of the subway, but not the Acela, either. Somewhere in between on the income scale. I just took the T from copley square to Harvard. Overheard lovely grandfather education of 6 year old. ” that used to be a jail, now it’s a hotel…..it used to be free, now you have to pay…” Love mass transit. I’ve found that this principle applies all over the world. On business trips and expat assignments I have found mass transit to be an enlightening experience. And oh, you should have seen the looks on some colleagues in Singapore when I would tell them I’m not using my driver today, I’m taking the train. Growing up in Boston in the sixties, as kids we always had the trolley. The MTA (later the MBTA) meant freedom. We could go anywhere in the city on the T for a dime (IIRC) and a transfer: out to Logan to watch planes land, downtown to people watch in the so-called Combat Zone (red light district), to the bookstores around Harvard Square, to the North End, Fenway, little Italy, Chinatown. We were sovereigns, without need of cars, parents, or other adult attachments. Ha! Yep … can confirm that even as a your adult immigrant to NYC, this was one of the 1st things I noticed – same line(s) too. Rush hour IRT 2,3,4 & 5 … starting in the bowels of Caribbean Brooklyn, curling up through gentrified-in-the-90’s-and-early-noughties Park Slope; followed by that first influx of predominantly white strap hangers at Atlantic Avenue – coming from both Long Island, and transfers from B/D/R train-land from the Italian and Russia Jewish neighborhoods in South Brooklyn. It seemed to me like an short, uncomfortable ride for many, as a large portion of them exited in the Financial District – Chambers/Fulton in Manhattan. For a brief time, I rode the #4 all the way from Utica to Moshulu Parkway in the Bronx … that was a truly eye-opening ride from and ethno-economic perspective. Thanks for sharing! Brought back memories!