Whenever the Seventh Avenue train races between Eighty-sixth and Ninety-sixth Streets and offers a fleeting, darkened glimpse of what looks like latter-day catacombs, the question invariably arises: What is it? From the windows of the Broadway Local the ghost of this Stone Age grotto, suddenly illumined by the speeding train, is a place only Dante or Kafka might have imagined. The walls are begrimed with thick 1970s-style graffiti, while something resembling a platform, strewn with debris, stands in the ashen dimness of places most cities would rather forget about.
But we stare all the same, until springing into view like painted letters on the hull of a sunken liner are the telltale faded mosaics spelling a station’s name: Ninety-first Street. The name appears again on a higher panel, framed by terra-cotta molding with golden numerals in relief, a combination typical of the cartouche created by Heins & LaFarge, the firm originally commissioned to design subway ceramics.
I became intrigued by the Ninety-first Street Station while riding the Broadway Local during one of its arbitrary halts. The train
idled to a halt outside Ninety-first, and during my enforced wait, I became aware of, then curious about, this abandoned stop. On my first extended view of the place, I was most struck by what was absent: no old-fashioned wooden token booth, no benches. The benches, says Joe Cunningham, a transportation and engineering historian, were removed as fire hazards, while turnstiles, originally installed in the early twenties, were salvaged for parts. There were no print ads along the walls. A sealed bathroom door was slightly discernible behind a loud smear of graffiti.
Of course, there couldn’t be an outlet to the street, though a shaft of light seemed to beam along the skeletal treads of a stairway. At the tail end of the station, a barely perceptible, differently styled ceramic tile suggested that however short its life span, even this station had gone through a face-lift and bore the traces of its various incarnations.
Similar alterations are hardly unusual in New York’s subways or in the city itself, where everything is a patchwork of swatches and layers, of bits and pieces, slapped together until you cannot see the fault lines for the surface, nor the surface for the patchwork. Subway corridors, stairwells, and sidewalk entrances are known to have disappeared, and tiled alcoves, designed to accommodate vintage phone booths, have vanished behind newly erected walls that sprout doors to become makeshift toolsheds. Ancient men’s rest rooms, famed for their shady practices, have mended their ways and been converted into candy stands.
Nothing is ever really demolished or dismantled down below, but everything is tentative and amorphous. From the width of platforms to the shape of lamp sockets down to the form of pillars (round, square, steel-beam), everything changes in the space of a few yards and betrays the many ways in which the city has always had to adjust to shifting demographics.
Stations whose token booths are absurdly positioned at the extreme end of the platform—Seventy—ninth, Eighty-sixth, and 110th Streets on Broadway, for example—will have their madness forgiven once you are told that they were designed to accommodate trains far shorter than those of today It was because the Eighty-sixth and Ninety-sixth Street platforms were extended to twice their size to receive ten-car trains that the Ninety-first Street Station, caught between the two and nearly touching both, saw the writing on the wall. It became obsolete. Its time, like that of the Eighteenth Street Station on the East Side or of the Worth Street and City Hall Stations, had run out. On February 2, 1959, the Ninety-first Street Station was closed permanently.
When asked, middle-aged New Yorkers seldom recall even missing the station. Like a friend who died and whose name mysteriously disappears from the Manhattan telephone book, the Ninety-first Street Station no longer exists on any of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s maps. It is extinct. Or is it, perhaps, just vestigial?
Indeed, the question I ask when passing the Ninety-first Street Station is not simply What is it? or What happened here? but something more wistful and unwieldy: What if? What if, instead of having the train dawdle awhile between stations, the conductor stopped at Ninety-first Street and on a mad impulse announced the station’s name, and then, carried away by the sound of his own words, forgot himself and suddenly opened the doors and began discharging passengers? Some of them would actually walk out, half startled and dazed, heading for imaginary turnstiles, past the old token booth, clambering up the stairway onto a sidewalk awash in the early-evening light as passengers had done for six decades until that fateful day forty years ago.
What if, for a split second, the mid-fifties were suddenly to rush
in, the way the thought of them invariably takes hold whenever I think of using not the side entrance to a prewar building on Riverside Drive but the defunct main gate on the drive itself, a gate no one uses any longer, but that, being sealed, beckons like a portal to vanished times?
And what if awaiting me barely a block away is the New Yorker Theater at Eighty-ninth Street, and farther up, the Riviera and the Riverside at Ninety-sixth Street? What if the films they’re about to show this year are Black Orpheus, Room at the Top, North by Northwest, The 400 Blows, and other late-fifties classics? What if things didn’t always have to disappear? What if time took another track, as subways do when there’s work ahead? Not backward, just different: a track we can’t quite fathom and whose secret conduits linking up the new with the old and the very, very old are known only to the loud yellow repair train that appears from nowhere in the dead of night and then lumbers away like a demoted god.
What if, in spite of its dead silence now, this station were a gateway to an underground that is ultimately less in the city than in ourselves, and that what we see in it is what we dare not see in ourselves? What if, for all its beguiling presence, the Ninety-first Street Station is really not even about time, or about hating to see things go, or about watching places grow more lonely and dysfunctional over time? Instead, what if this underground cavern were my double, a metaphor for the pulsating, dirty, frightened dungeon within all of us which feels as lonely and abandoned, and as out of place and out of sync with the rest of the world, as we all fear we are, though we try to hide it, eager as we are to patch up our uneasiness as fast as we can, hoping that, as fast as it can, too, our train will pass this station by, put it behind us, and take us, like people who have been to see Hades, back to the world of the living?
I finally went to visit the old station one day with a small group of subway aficionados led by Mr. Cunningham on a tour run by the New York Transit Museum at Boerum Place and Schermerhorn Street in downtown Brooklyn. We got on at Ninety-sixth Street and rode in the first car of the Broadway Local. At Ninety-first the train did in fact stop, just as I had fantasized. The conductor opened the front doors only, and to the baffled gaze of the other passengers, we stepped out. Then the doors closed again, and the train left, everyone watching us as though we were spectral travelers headed into a time warp. Wandering through this modern underworld, I tried to think of the great poets and the caves of Lascaux and Planet of the Apes, but all I could focus on as I negotiated my way through a thick mantle of soot was dirt, rats, and a faint queasiness.
The platform was filled with trash: broken beams, old cardboard, and a litter of foam cups. This wasn’t just the detritus of a subway station but the leftovers of mole people. There was enough of it to confuse future archaeologists, whose job, it suddenly occurred to me, is not only to dig up the past but also to scrape the rubble of squatters from that of the great civilizations whose abandoned homes squatters made their own.
I stood there, staring at what must surely have once been the gleaming tiles of a perfectly proportioned station with its perfectly curved platform. Like all armchair archaeologists, I had come here to prod the raw cells of the city’s past and see how everything, down to an unused subway station, can be touched by time and, like the layers underneath the city of Troy, is ultimately sanctified by time.
I wanted to see how inanimate objects refuse to forget or suggest that all cities—like people, like palimpsests, like the remains of a Roman temple hidden beneath an ancient church—do not simply have to watch themselves go but strive to remember, because in the
wish to remember lies the wish to restore, to stay alive, to continue to be.
I knew I would never come here again. But I also knew that I had not put this station behind me either. In a few days I would pass by again and, again as if I’d never stopped here at all or had bungled an experiment I now needed to repeat, would ask myself, again and again, the one question I’ve been asking each time I speed by Ninety-first on the Broadway Local line and am invariably brought to think of the past: What if the train were to stop one day and let me off?