New York's 100 year old boroughs
For the past 100 years, billions of New Yorkers have vanished from the city´s sidewalks and into a hole in the ground.
Is nothing more sinister than that they entered the New York Subway, the vast and complex system of trains, tunnels and tracks, and stairways and stations whose growth under the ground has fueled the city´s growth above the ground. What began a hundred years ago with one 22-mile line between City Hall and the then-bucolic Bronx has grown into a maze of 27 routes that reach into four of the city´s five boroughs, a total of nearly 700 miles — about the distance to Chicago. Oct. 27, 2004.
Here are some new books to marks the subway´s centennial. Join in the celebration:
- New Yorker Stan Fischler, perhaps better known as a sportscaster and hockey writer, has been riding the subway for more than 60 years. In The Subway and the City: Celebrating a Century (Frank Merriwell, Inc.), written with John Henderson, Fischler offers plenty to read about and to look at in a 547-page book crammed with text and more than 375 images, including archival photos of trains, stations, and construction of subway and elevated lines.
- Two words you don´t often hear together are in the title of Subway Style (Stewart, Tabori & Chang). In this book you can find just about everything found in the city's subway and elevated lines: trains, stations, bridges and kiosks; station details, including tile work, furniture, turnstiles, lighting, vending machines and agent booths; and graphics applied to information signs, advertising, maps and MetroCards. Many of the items are from the museum's collection.
- A colorful little scrapbook of subway history and memorabilia is found in Subways: The Tracks That Built New York City (Clarkson Potter). With the help of archival photographs, artifacts, and interviews with New Yorkers, Lorraine B. Diehl explains how the subway was designed and built, and explores its role in the lives of New Yorkers.
- On an average weekday, the subway serves 4.5 million riders. A few of them have had their images captured in the 77 color photos in Peter Peter´s The Subway Pictures (Random House). In the photos, riders nap, read a book or newspaper, fix their makeup or stare blankly into space on their way to wherever. One guy plays an accordion, another crochets, another holds a canned drink. All are everyday New Yorkers, photographed by Peter with a simple 3-megapixel camera during the three years since the Sept. 11 attacks.