The Greatest Transit System on Earth, Built by Hand
Ask any real New Yorker how they get around this city, and the answer is almost never a car. It is the subway, and it has been the subway for more than 120 years. Before there was Google Maps, before there was a Citi Bike dock on every corner, there was a hole in the ground beneath Manhattan, and everything about how this city moved changed forever.
I have ridden these trains my whole life, and I will say something that might sound strange coming from a history teacher rather than a transit engineer. The New York City subway is not just infrastructure. It is the circulatory system of the greatest city on earth, and it is one of the only truly democratic spaces left in America. A hedge fund manager and a dishwasher stand on the same platform, wait for the same delayed train, and squeeze into the same crowded car during rush hour. Nowhere else in this country does that happen the way it happens here, every single day, underground.
On October 27, 1904, Mayor George B. McClellan Jr. took the controls of the ceremonial first train at the ornate, curved City Hall station. By the end of opening day, more than 100,000 New Yorkers had paid a nickel each for the privilege of descending into a brand-new underground world. The original 9.1-mile line ran north from City Hall beneath Park Avenue South, cut west across 42nd Street, and turned north up Broadway to 145th Street in Harlem. New York had never seen anything like it…