Douglas Kennedy: his trip along the line A of the New York metro

We were promised a day in an enchanted forest; an Elysée of greenery, tall branches and golden foliage. We were dangled from buried treasures – and, perhaps, the unearthing of arrowheads fashioned by the ancient, long-dead native residents. We had been warned that we would soon enter that lost realm known as the old days.

But to reach this magical land, we would have to take line A.

We were downtown kids, attending a progressive elementary school in Manhattan's East Village. The year: 1962. The month: October, during those crucial weeks when our president (John Fitzgerald Kennedy) was playing nuclear poker with the Soviets because of missiles aimed at us from the socialist island of Cuba, seventy kilometers barely off the American coast. Of course, no one in my little class was aware of what was going on – we only heard anxious whispered conversations between our parents, or the whispers of our schoolmasters weighing the risks of mutual destruction.

Journey to the end of the world

But life had to go on, and we had been promised for weeks an expedition to the northern end of our island. We were to visit a park called Inwood, where Native Americans once lived in tepees, and where they hunted their game – and protected themselves against the enemy – with bows and arrows.

Remember when you were 7 how long a year seemed to last? And how a family outing in the car always triggered an attack of suffocating boredom punctuated by "We're coming soon"? For us children, going north from the corner of 11th Street and 2nd Avenue (where our school was located) to reach 207th Street, at the very top of the Upper West Side, was like to endure the entirety of Wagner's Twilight of the Gods. You had to walk from school to Astor Place, take the 6 line to Grand Central Station, then the shuttle west to the 8th Avenue subway, then finally, once on board a train from line A, wait another three quarters of an hour until the terminus.

"But we're going to the end of the world!" one of my classmates complained.

She was not wrong: line A is long, very long. It starts at the far northern edge of the city and curves the length of Manhattan like a gigantic underground spine before plunging under the East River. Then it crosses the soft underbelly of Brooklyn and surfaces somewhere in Queens, from where it goes straight for the ocean. It is therefore a journey that literally takes you from the forest to the sea – but which does so in the hyperurbanized setting of one of the most important centers of human activity on the planet.

To put it more evocatively, this line of the New York subway was made legendary by a prodigious jazz standard – Take the “A” Train – recorded for the first time in 1941 by the great Duke Ellington and composed by his faithful in-house musical genius, Billy Strayhorn. This huge unsung hero of American music was an arranger for the Duke big band and the author of many Ellington classics. His Take the “A” Train is not only a timeless jazz standard, but also an inseparable anthem of New York, so emblematic it expresses the swinging and syncopated rhythm of the city. As stalwarts of Harlem – the main African-American neighborhood at a time when racial segregation was still rampant – both Strayhorn and Ellington were familiar with the “A” Train, which brought them home from the white world below. from 110th Street.

For a third-generation New Yorker like me, born and raised on Manhattan Island, the A line has always been a part of intimate geography. Since that first endless journey to Inwood Park in 1962, it has remained a constant in my New York daily life.

But the New York of our restless times is an entirely different mental construct from the city of my childhood. And it is clear to me that, like any major public transport line, the A is much more than a huge urban pipeline dividing a long stretch of my city down the middle; it is also an underground reflection of its current contradictions and complexities. So this idea came to me: take a day to go underground and do a barometric survey of the psyche of modern New York. I would take line A from one end to the other, and I would descend from it from time to time to take the pulse of the time in my hometown.

At the 207th Street terminus, I immediately notice a restaurant called The Capitol, which seems straight out of the 1950s: a real old, decrepit shack, whose name is displayed above the door in this bold post-war calligraphy reminiscent of Eames furniture and the neon splendor of Broadway – before this avenue turned into a shopping mall. There, the buildings are low rise, residential, and the predominant language is Spanish. Local businesses: a nail salon, a hardware store, two or three bodegas. Not a Starbucks on the horizon, nor one of those drugstore chains (Duane Read, CVS, Walgreens) which are nevertheless spreading like metastases in the New York panorama... to the point that you are never further away. 'one minute walk from their cursed pharmacies (a real visual delight).

New York, a city that "rips everyone off except the rich"

Inwood – as the neighborhood is called – has retained its character. Apart from a bagel stall, few signs of gentrification have arrived so far. The park is as vast and green as in my memories of the famous school outing. But now, decades later, living in this once ultra-isolated corner of northern Manhattan has become expensive. In front of a real estate agency, my eyes widen when I learn that a 120 square meter apartment with a view of the park is now selling for $730,000. There was a time when Inwood was a pittance — because it was filthy and you had to drive through red-light districts to get there. At the time, the metro was a place where you risked serious bodily harm after dark. This until the municipal mandate of Rudolph Giuliani: a politician endowed with a certain penchant for Manichaeism and Jesuitical certainties, who made New York the city we know today, safer, more inoffensive, more open to the ultra-rich, less aggressive. This had the effect of turning places like Inwood – once considered about as accessible as Greenland – into “interesting” places, with prices to match.

“Ho, dude, are you giving a dollar?”

The one talking to me is an emaciated, toothless, 60-something African American whose clothes look like they haven't been washed since the summer (and it's mid-October). Judging by the filthy foam mattress he carries on his back, he must sleep outside.

It is posted right at the entrance to the station. For my part, I struggle with my metro card, but the turnstile, blocked for some reason, refuses me passage. The homeless, seeing this, pull a cleaner by the sleeve, a young Hispanic, about 25 years old, in regulation blue uniform but with the bewildered gaze of a heavy stoner.

“Hep, you! This guy is being screwed over by the city,” the homeless man said, pointing at me.

The sweeper immediately opens the emergency gate and beckons me to approach. “I wouldn't want you to be fooled by this damn town. Even though she's scamming everyone - except those rich bastards. So you see, I don't care if you pay for the trip or not. Come on, pass. On the other hand, we should give a few dollars to our friend, there.”

I slip a fiver to the homeless.

"That'll buy me lunch! he says, patting me on the back. It kicks me, me, your bullshit Good Samaritan.

Everyone is talking, at a considerable volume

Replies like this come as no surprise to New York natives like me. Take the Underground in London (as I did for twenty-three years) and you will notice that silence reigns supreme. The conversations are whispered, the eyes do not meet, and this very English variety of misanthropy which consists in fleeing any interaction with others in a public place is pushed to its maximum. The New York City Subway, on the other hand, is a permanent theater – highly vocal and interactive, sometimes a little extreme and avant-garde, even bordering on the absurd. And everyone is talking. Has a considerable volume.

Once in the basement, as I jump into a train, I hear a thundering voice at the other end of the car: "I told him: the next time he tries his tricks of perverse in the stake, I engrave my initials in his tail.

She is a very blond woman in tight white leather pants and matching white leather jacket, perched on impressive stiletto heels. She chews gum with metronome regularity and talks into a white iPhone.

“Why am I a smoker? Are you asking me the question? Can't you see why I'm breaking your balls with this? But because you're the one who screwed me up. I'll tell you, it was like getting fucked by a cream donut."

The wonderful thing about this tirade is that no one in the car is the least bit bothered by these high-decibel intimate confessions. The train begins to roll south… and I find myself sitting opposite a couple in their thirties with a decidedly unhip look: big glasses, clothes made of natural fibers that smell of community in Vermont, socks in sandals. The woman pulls an old jar from her canvas bag. It is filled with a dark purple liquid. She unscrews the lid and hands it to her man. "Trust me, beets and elderberries will get you through a UTI in no time." UTI, in other words a urinary tract infection. Is she herself in the midst of cystitis, or is she administering this poisonous purple sci-fi brew to her companion because he suffers martyrdom every time he has to relieve his bladder? Ah, the big unanswered questions of the A line…

We are still driving south. I get off at 168th Street. Washington Heights. A district that is still highly Latino. Still resisting the influx of cafe latte and hipster goatee – though it too has become desirable due to its stunning architectural capital. Blocks and blocks of venerable apartment buildings, streets where the eye is never stopped by the ugliness of modern glass and steel towers, a very village, community, close-knit atmosphere. A real Manhattan barrio.

Let's go back south. A young man walks up to 148th Street. Thin as a thread. The early twenties. Cappuccino skin, narrow gray pants, gray shirt, pointy pumps in gray alligator skin, small gray felt hat on the head, huge square black glam rock glasses, transparent plastic raincoat. Big headphones slapped on his ears, he sings at the top of his voice; in a false voice without pity for our eardrums. Beside him, two construction workers, apparently: 28 or 29 years old, in sweatshirts, baseball caps, small beer bellies, construction shoes with metal shells.

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"She keeps telling me: give me another kid. Me, I answer him: how do you want us to pay for a fifth mouth to feed? Damn, I'm already doing twenty overtime a week, and we're barely making ends meet. And she wants one more kid?

Welcome to Trumpland – where the once stable American middle class finds itself forced to fight daily to stay afloat in a society with little to offer in terms of a safety net, and where social Darwinism is dominant ethics.

I'm getting off at 125th Street. Thirty years ago, showing my very white face on the streets of Harlem would have been like asking for trouble. In fact, just about anything north of 110th Street (except the area around Columbia University) was considered a no-travel zone, high-risk terrain. But today…

Today, I stroll down Harlem's main thoroughfare, dismayed to see this legendary thoroughfare invaded by the forces of standardization. Yes, the Apollo Theatre, that sanctuary of soul music, retains its magnificence intact. It's still one of the city's last great old-fashioned music halls, a throwback to the visual extravagance of the 1920s. UNITED STATES. But right next to it, a promoter has installed a Banana Republic brand sign. Opposite is a Gap store. And a gym. And the Starbucks of rigor, and the signs of pharmacies. Of course, we feel safe there. Admittedly, it is no longer a ghetto, although the horizon is bristling with hideous housing estates built in the 1960s and 1970s. And certainly, Harlem is on the way to gentrification. But to see that the bland emblems of modern consumerism have stripped 125th Street of its fantastic personality is heartbreaking. One of the great curses of standardization is that everywhere it goes, everything looks alike.

Line A then heads south, non-stop from 125th to 59th Street. Two musicians boarded just as we were driving off, both loaded with big African drums. They settle in a free space in the wagon and announce that they are going to play a piece from Senegal. The speed of the subway seems to spur them on, to see the frantic rhythm that their bursts of percussion take on as they approach the next station. Then, passing the hat, one of them says, “A few dollars each, and we can have dinner tonight. If you're broke, we like smiles too.

Almost everyone hands them a dollar or two, except for an old man who turns to the beggar and says, “You want to deaf me? I hate tom-toms, damn it.”

The subway: a journey through the city... and social classes

At 59th Street, two suits and ties get into the car. Clean, stocky, no longer very young, in similar Brooks Brothers outfits: uninspired jacket and matching pants, shirt, striped tie. America's office uniform. "I just bought Brad his first golf clubs," said one.

— He's what, twelve years old?

— Eleven! But you have to see him use a 5 iron!”

Golf clubs at eleven. It smells of the beautiful residential suburbs, that. Tidy, very bourgeois.

Next stop: 42nd Street. When I was a teenager, the 8th Avenue-42nd Street intersection was the epicenter of squalid New York. Porn cinemas for both sexes. Prostitutes on every street corner. Junkies. The lost and the lost. Guys who would not have hesitated to steal his bag from a naive just got off the bus at the Port Authority bus station – still a place labeled at the time “you who enter here, give up all hope”.

Ah yes, 42nd Street and 8th Avenue, in my youth, it was quite picaresque. And the place was the target of a serious Giuliani-style cleanup in the 1990s. balcony (we see that in the movie Macadam Cowboy). Now the town is what is known in marketing jargon as a "family destination," with Disney musicals, an offshoot of Madame Tussaud's wax museum, shops selling Nikes and basic caps- ball, restaurant chains, what else do I know.

Do I miss hookers, sex shops, stepping on hypodermic needles dropped by a heroin' drug addict on the corner? No way. But the blandness of 42nd Street today alone symbolizes a city that was once affordable, filthy, dangerous but also shady and full of life. The dirty and disreputable city of Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Scorsese's Taxi Driver... these mean streets have been largely castrated by the asepsis of modern capitalism. And New York has lost its dark soul there.

Let's continue to 4th Street West. The heart of Greenwich Village. A place where folk clubs largely created this once bohemian neighborhood – along with its famous little cafes where, in the early 1970s, a young teenage me would sip espresso (a hard-to-find commodity at the time) in an Italian café on MacDougal Street while imagining myself in Rome (my real encounter with this city would come later). Bob Dylan wrote a song called Positively 4th Street when he was debuting in nearby clubs. From the past, there remains a vestige – the Blue Note – and another jazz bar not far away, The Zinc. The Village is no longer bohemian. It has become elegant, sophisticated, absurdly overpriced – but it is still one of the best preserved architectural features in the city. Provided you can pay the entrance fee.

My next stop on line A is Fulton Street. Manhattan becomes very narrow at its lower end. Turning to the right as you leave the station, you can see the Freedom Tower rising to its full height on the former site of the World Trade Center – and you inevitably think back to 9/11, which remains a pivotal event in modern history and whose ramifications continue to reshape global geopolitics. While going east, you quickly get lost in a maze of small streets full of men's clothing shops where middle managers get their supplies, small Korean electronics shops, and tailors. These decidedly cheesy businesses appeal to me — because they remind me of the days when every neighborhood in New York City had small stores like these… most of which have been driven out by rent inflation.

Return to the metro: the line then passes under the river. We are leaving Manhattan. And let's get out into Brooklyn. A borough dear to my heart – my two parents were born there, in working-class neighborhoods – where I went every other weekend to see my German maternal great-uncle and great-aunt. They were Jewish, like my mother, and had fled Germany in 1938, just after Kristallnacht. They were my first connection to what we Americans call “the Old World,” especially since they spoke German among themselves and their apartment in Flatbush took us right back to the 19th century.

Brooklyn today, on line A:

High Street: Exit for Brooklyn Heights. Vast townhouses, a scent of Edith Wharton's old New York, still valiant and lovingly preserved (though, of course, the high society of her novels would never have considered settling in Brooklyn), splendid vistas on Manhattan. Brooklyn Heights was once a hotspot for bohemian life. The writers who took up residence there were Henry Miller, Hart Crane, Truman Capote, Paul Bowles, Norman Mailer, W. H. Auden. Now the place is owned by Wall Street bankers who can afford to shell out millions for a river view.

A few more minutes on the line, and here we are at the intersection of Kingston and Throop avenues, on the edge of a neighborhood called Bedford-Stuyvesant. Or, in the local idiom: Bed-Stuy. In the early years of our new century, it was still the harshest of ghettos. Gang violence, drug trafficking violence: the risk of ending up violently beaten up was high. Now, when the rest of Brooklyn is financially out of reach for the young artists who still flocked there twenty years ago because of low rents and the BoHo vibe, Bed-Stuy is suddenly all the rage. A writer friend who has lived there for five years told me recently: “The day Bed-Stuy becomes too expensive for artists, we will know that the city will have changed to the point of no longer being recognizable.”

Jesus is everywhere, even on the A line

After Grant Avenue, the A line starts to go up. And suddenly, we find ourselves in the open air. In the borough of Queens. Opposite Ozone Park: an inner suburb populated by immigrants, appreciated after the war by Italian working-class families. Now, large Latin American, Asian and West Indian communities have settled there. It's still a world of rows of tidy townhouses, warehouses and earnest Catholic churches, imbued with a solid blue-collar identity. A little further down the line is Aqueduct. My maternal grandfather, a jeweler from the Diamond District in Manhattan, went there “at the track” – that is, in New York jargon, he went to play the races. Aqueduct has always been the place to bet on horses and see your champion come dead last. The racetrack is still there. But next door stands a gigantic garishly colored “multiplex casino” – boasting its 4,000 slot machines.

A man walks up to Howard Beach wearing a “Jesus is your friend” cap and carrying a large plastic box full of chocolates. “I would just like 25 cents from each of you so I can eat today. Buy me some chocolates…please.”

This is the fifth time on the trip that someone begs because they are hungry. So is the world, not just in New York, but in every major city today. We are almost back to the 19th century when it comes to the divide between haves and have-nots.

I hand him a dollar.

"Bless you, sir," he said to me. And remember: Jesus is always there for you.

—Even on line A?”

He smiled. “Always, on line A.”

Before the gates close at Howard Beach, I smell salt in the urban air. A few minutes later, we cross a viaduct, above bubbling eddies: the water of the Atlantic, stormy and choppy as we approach Kennedy Airport. Very quickly, we feel almost at sea. We pass in front of houses on stilts, battered by the elements, and small sailboats prancing on the waves. For a moment, I could swear I was in a fishing port in Maine and not some corner of New York City. The further east you go, the more the sea asserts its hold on the landscape. Here we are in Rockaway – a still largely working-class area, where the usual Brutalist architectural errors of the 1970s mix with villas that one would rather expect to see on the beaches near Boston. However, here too there is the beach. Moreover, all the last stops of line A have the word beach in their name.

I jump off the wagon at Beach 44. As I exit the station, I descend a few steps and a small path leads me directly onto a long stretch of sand. The sky is gloomy, undecided. The sea foams. I have the beach to myself. The ideal setting for a walk. Of course, New York is famous for its urban beaches: Riis Park, Jones Beach, Coney Island. But here, in Rockaway, I really have the impression of being on the very edge of the New World, my eyes plunged into the great beyond of the Atlantic. And I realize that this ride on the A line inevitably led me to long questions about the ever-changing identities of New York; that a big city is a flexible construction, in perpetual reinvention, for better and for worse.

A light rain begins to fall. I go back to the metro. I wait for the train for ten minutes. It is practically empty. Two more stops along the beach, and we reach Far Rockaway. The metro stops in a final hiccup. The doors open. I go down. I reach the street. Far Rockaway is gray, bleak, harsh, authentic. And that's the end of the line.

📸 In pictures: New York on the subway with writer Douglas Kennedy.

➤ An exclusive text published in GEO magazine n°466 (December 2017).

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