Subway Lives: 24 Hours in the Life of the New York City Subway - Hardcover

A New York Newsday columnist with a novelist's eye and fine sense of pacing explores the world of the N.Y.C. subway--in a timely account that is not only about the city's transit system but also about its people and its soul. Dwyer spent four years reporting on the subway system for New York Newsday, and his dogged hands-on experience shows. Here, he follows a handful of typical New Yorkers--including a train conductor, a pregnant mother, a token clerk, graffiti artists, and Transit Authority president David Gunn--through one composite day on the subway. But their lives form only the loosest of frameworks; between snippet descriptions of their day, Dwyer dexterously weaves in fascinating accounts of the subway's (and the city's) history and mythology. He writes of turnstile sucking and token-booth robberies, of botched city-government transactions and a birth on a train, of entrapment in a darkened tunnel and relentless graffiti wars between a Hispanic ``graffiti posse'' and a rich white kid from the Upper West Side. His descriptions bring the teeming, untamed transit system into sharp, palpable focus (``Everything about the cars is colossal...800,000 pounds of metal and plastic and another quarter million of flesh and blood, the greatest moving mass of human tissue in the universe, apart from the planet earth'') and offer heaps of startling details: today's subways carry only half the number of riders they did after WW II; 90 tons of garbage are pulled from the subways daily. Underneath it all, too, is a strong, stirring sense of the pride and frustration, hope and despair that go along with being a New Yorker. A first-rate study that reaches far beyond its ostensible subject to give a textured, gritty profile of New York past and present. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

This isn't likely to find many readers west of the Hudson, but residents of New York City's boroughs should take note, for although one doesn't expect to be enthralled by a virtual monograph on the New York City subway, talent will out and Dwyer brings it off. The well-integrated statistical material is impressive: the subway transports 3.7 million paying riders daily, plus an estimated 169,000 turnstile jumpers; the Transit Authority's "money room" is the "world's busiest private currency processing enterprise"; the system is the only one anywhere to operate 24 hours a day. The book makes us privy to TA politics and profiles managers, including David Gunn, who solved the graffiti problem, saving the system $10 million annually in cleanups. Verging on the smarmy, however, are some of the human interest stories, one about a welfare mother giving birth on the subway, another of a retarded boy taking his first solo ride. Dwyer, a New York Newsday reporter whose beat is the subway, presents a balanced depiction of the crime that makes riders fearful, not sensationalizing its frequency. And he's on the mark when he comments, "Only in the dim warrens of the subway . . . can the full spectrum of city life . . . be glimpsed, felt, and at times even understood."
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.