View from Underground

Once upon a time, subway stations were architectural marvels. (Photo by Benjamin Kabak)

The history of architectural design and the New York City subways is a tortured one. The system’s nicest station was also its first, and it’s been all downhill since then. Maybe that’s why New Yorkers have such a love-hate relationship with the subway system that powers the city’s economy and why straphangers are so dismissive of their underground atmospheres.

When the first subway stop opened at City Hall, it was an architectural marvel. With sweeping Guastavino arches, the Heins & LaFarge-designed station eventually landed on the National Register of Historic Places, but no other station in the system looks like it for one reason: cost. It was far too expensive for the city to build such ornate complexes at every stop, and instead, the IRT builders adapted a cheaper mosaic-based tiling. Today, many of those stations are in need of repair and, as a result of their depths, suffer from water damage. The tiling and mosaics, though, are historic reminders of the early days of construction.

Over the years, subsequent builders maintained tiling to a point. The IND stations used a complicated color pattern to mark various stations, but eventually, pragmatic concerns over cost and so-called modern designs turned new subway stops into giant nothings. The Archer Ave. extension stations are unforgettable, but at least they’re not bright orange like the 1970s reworking of Bowling Green. The “experimental” redesign at 49th Street also dates from the 1970s. It is not a proud moment in subway history.

Today's modern subway stations are more evocative of sterile hospitals than anything else. (Photo by Benjamin Kabak)

Finally, in the modern era, stations are simply bland. The new South Ferry terminal is a sterile white room, and the Second Ave. Subway stations, based on early renderings, look to be more of the same. While I’d say that a few billion dollars doesn’t go that far when it comes to design, the MTA will point to the Second Ave. stations as examples of current design. They stations are wide, spacious, airy and ADA compliant. Beauty is in the ey of the beholder.

But what of the architectural community? Recently, Mark Lamster, writing at The Design Observer Group’s Observer Room blog pondered the lack of attention paid to transit design. While public pedestrian plazas and bike lanes have received the bulk of the attention, we continue to ignore the way the subway system looks. He writes:

Progressive members of the design community love cycling, and I think not just because it is a healthful and environmentally sustainable mode of transportation. Designers, I suspect, are attracted to bikes because designers love making objects—it is what they are trained to do—and the bike is an object that is simple enough that anyone can tailor it to their own specifications…

I wish designers cared as much about mass transit as they did about their bikes. We don’t get very many articles in the design press about our decayed subway system, nor does there seem to be much of a galvanized movement within the design community to do anything about it…Transportation Alternatives, a wonderful organization, bills itself as an “advocate for bicycling, walking and public transit,” which seems bizarrely out of order to me. When the design (and architecture) press covers mass transit here, it’s often to wax nostalgic about Massimo Vignelli’s map of the system—wonderful, I admit.

New York is never going to be Amsterdam. Commuting by bicycle may work for some people, and the more the better, but for the overwhelming majority it’s not going to be a viable option most of the time. New York is a city of public transit, and that’s where the vast majority of our attention should be directed. It is the single most important urban design issue facing the city and its residents. By far. More than 5.1 million rides are taken on the subway on an average weekday. Bus service adds another 2.2 million. Service cutbacks loom. Last week I renewed a Metrocard for a month. The fee was $104. The fee for renewing my driver’s license for ten years? $80. Our priorities need to change.

To me, the issue of design is one of attention. The public faces of the MTA are a bunch of stations that look like they were designed seventy years ago and were never modernized. They’re dank and dark and falling apart. Most design elements that were once appealing have faded, and the nicest looking station rehabs — such as at Franklin St. in Tribeca — aren’t at particularly high-traffic spots.

So should we care then about station design and appearance? Does an interestingly designed station that is well maintained attract more riders? Would such a station also make New Yorkers more supportive of their transit system? I’d have to believe so. Transit design should be on the table. Not every map needs to be a jumble of words. Not every new station has to look as bland as a hospital.

Over the past five years, as I’ve written about various attitudes toward the New York City subway system, I’ve often said that the city could not thrive without its transit network. We are more prone toward dwelling on the negatives and griping about delayed trains or crowded commutes than we are to sit back and appreciate what we have. Every now and then, though, a story somewhere drives home that point, and this week, Crain’s New York hosts such a tale.

The story from Crain’s isn’t exactly one of praise for the MTA. In fact, it focuses on just the opposite: After a fall of shuttle buses and service diversions, Williamsburg business owners are fed up with MTA weekends because the lack of trains is having a serious impact on their respective bottom lines. Adrianne Pasquarelli has the story:

William Norton spent the days leading up to the crucial Black Friday shopping weekend taping up flyers and composing an email blast to the 7,000 patrons of Peachfrog, his Williamsburg, Brooklyn-based store. But after ringing up 120 transactions that Friday, sales plummeted on Small Business Saturday and again on Sunday—the same days the neighborhood’s primary link with Manhattan, the L train, was shut down for maintenance. “Nobody was here,” said Mr. Norton, who sells an eclectic mix of apparel, shoes and antiques. “I lost 80% of my business, compared with last year.”

Weekend ridership on the L has jumped 141% since 1998, largely because it is the only line serving the heart of increasingly trendy Williamsburg. The problem nowadays is that all too frequently, that lifeline has been cut, inconveniencing residents and battering local businesses. What’s more, even when the L is up and running, the waiting time between trains is long and the cars overcrowded.

Since July, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has completely or partially shut down service on the L on a dozen weekends. The weekend after Black Friday was the worst, though. Merchants reported that business slumped 20% to 80% from last year’s levels. In response, they’ve begun meeting with community leaders and reaching out to local politicians and the MTA to figure out alternatives. “We’re not crazy people,” said Felice Kirby, co-owner of Teddy’s Bar and Grill on North Eighth Street and Berry Avenue. “We know they have work to do, and we want people to get to work on weekdays, but we count, too—there’s an imbalance.”

Slow sales are only half the problem. Without an easy lifeline to Manhattan, employees have found it onerous to commute to work from far-away locales, and residents can’t stray too far afield from the neighborhoods for fear of being left without a ride home.

Pasquarelli, meanwhile, hits upon only half of the problem. While she focuses on the L train’s woes, service changes have sidelined the G as well. The IND Crosstown line has either been running in sections or not at all, and those in Park Slope and Boerum Hill who want to reach Williamsburg on the weekends cannot. On more than one occasion this fall, I’ve had to change weekend plans when subway service changes made a trip to Williamsburg from Park Slope impractical. At times, without the Q, L, G or Manhattan-bound IRT local service, I had no easy transit route north.

So here we see how the subway rules our lives, our city and our economy. Without subway service, business slumps by 60 percent points. Although Williamsburg enjoys a ferry stop, Pasquarelli notes it carried just 5500 passengers last weekend as compared with 38,000 at Bedford Ave. alone on a typical weekend. So as suburban representatives take aim at MTA funding mechanisms, remember that the city cannot survive without its subway, let alone thrive.

A few months ago, I noticed a placard had popped up at the remaining token booths throughout the city’s subway system. These booths trumpeted a new accessibility project that would better outfit subway stations with technology that enables the hard-of-hearing to ask for directions and receive information from the station agents. Today, NY1 explores this new initiative.

The technology is based upon a “hearing loop” that has been in use for a few decades. The MTA has adopted it for over 400 booths throughout the subway system. Kafi Drexel reports:

The technology, known as an induction loop, is already common in some European countries. The loops, placed around the perimeter of a room or window, sends out electromagnetic signals that can jump to a receiver called a telechoil or “t-coil,” which is already in most hearing aids or cochlear implants. When the t-coil is switched on, it picks up only what comes through a microphone or loudspeaker and cancels out the background noise.

The $13.5 million subway hearing loop project is the largest in the country. “Induction loops were a federal stimulus project. It was a project we were considering and had completely designed, so the project came directly from the federal government,” says Marc Bienstock of MTA NYC Transit.

Advocates say the technology is so advanced that the sound can actually come across more clearly than what New Yorkers without any hearing loss might normally hear. “It’s gaining attention now but it’s not even new. I seem to recall back 20, 25 years our hearing aids had t-coils on them. You used them for the telephone. Nobody talked about it,” says Arlene Romoff of the Hearing Loss Association. “To put this infrastructure in looping systems, where it can actually do some good aside from just hearing on a phone or sitting in a looped room, to finally literally get light shown on this, it’s enormous.”

The MTA has faced criticism for its slow response to the ADA and the glacial pace of the attempts at making the system accessible. The authority has pledged to make 100 “key” stations ADA-compliant by 2020, and disabilities advocates have accused the MTA of shirking on its ADA responsibilities during rehabs of non-key stations. This effort, a small one in the grand scheme of the MTA’s overall budget, will help improve commutes for those who are hard of hearing, and that’s a worthwhile goal indeed.

This is the story of Carolyn Hopkins, the woman behind some of the prerecorded announcements that provide the soundtrack to our subway commutes. The CBS news story is perfect fodder for whiling away the final hours of work on a Friday afternoon. (Via WNYC’s Tumblr)

A storm surge of just over feet could take out the New York City subway system for nearly a month, according to some projections. (Via Transportation Nation. Click to enlarge)

With Hurricane Irene bearing down on New York in late August, the MTA took the nearly unprecedented step of shutting down the city’s subway system. Faced with dire predictions of potential storm surges that could easily flood the various East River tunnels, the MTA had to protect its employees and passengers while attempting to minimize damage to old equipment susceptible to salt water.

As we know, the city was spared the worst of the storm, but Metro-North’s Port Jervis line suffered heavy damage. Some New Yorkers were critical of the city’s reaction and the inconvenience it caused, but others in policy positions worried that we were simply delaying the inevitable. At some point, a big storm will cause serious damage to our transportation infrastructure. It’s not a matter of if but when.

Earlier this week, scientists from Columbia, Cornell and CUNY issued a report at the behest of the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority exploring the impact climate change could have on the state. You can read The Times’ top-line coverage right here. I had planned to explore what this report had to say about the subways, but Andrea Bernstein, in a very comprehensive piece for Transportation Nation, beat me to it. Read her piece right here.

For those us interested in subway service, Bernstein’s reporting touches upon two key issues. First, she talks with Projjol Dutta, the MTA’s Climate Adaptation Specialist, who was brought on to make the MTA’s operations more environmentally-friendly but has focused on climate-change remediation issues instead. He helped develop plans to raise ventilation grates in order to keep too much rainwater from flooding the subways as it did back in August of 2007.

Dutta explored how climate change and the anticipated effects has led the MTA to develop ways to cool platforms and how these costs impact the MTA’s capital plans. With higher temperatures expected over the next century, the MTA must keep the air underground cooler. “We have to get that heat out,” Dutta said. “This is not for something as superficial as personal comfort, there’s lots of electronics that a train carries. We had a lot of heat related problems, so we’ve had to introduce cooling into areas that did not hitherto require heating…“Our core mission is to provide trains, buses, and subways. [Climate change] takes something away from that core mission. If you did not need the air tempering, you could have built another station.”

The second part concerns flooding. Bernstein writes:

[Columbia professor Klaus] Jacob has worked with the MTA to model what would happen if you couple sea level rises – the FTA says to expect four feet by the end of this century – with intense storms like Irene. In forty minutes, Jacob says, all the East River Tunnels would be underwater. Jacob says he took those results to the MTA, and asked, if that happened, how long would it take to restore the flooded subway to a degree of functionality?

“And there was a big silence in the room because the system is so old. Many of the items that would be damaged by the intrusion of the saltwater into the system could not recover quickly. You have to take them apart. You have to clean them from salt, dry them, reassemble them, test them and cross your fingers that they work.”

In a best-case scenario, Jacob calculated that it would take 29 days to get the subway working again. But in the meantime, a halted subway would almost halt the city’s economy, which, he says produces $4 billion a day in economic activity. The thing is, Jacob says, the city came within a foot of that happening during Irene. Because the astronomical tides were so high, and the storm so intense, the storm surge mimicked a future where the sea is much higher than it is now. During Irene, Jacob says, the storm surge was 3.6 feet. “Had it been not 3.6 feet but 4.6, we would have been in deep trouble.”

These are dire predictions of dire times, and there’s no easy solution in sight. The MTA doesn’t have storm gates for its tunnels, and its infrastructure is indeed vulnerable to the so-called Big One. As Bernstein notes, Jay Walder said it best: “The worst fear that we had, which was that the under river tunnels on the East River would flood with salt water, were not realized. We certainly dodged something there.” What happens next time?