This one comes to from Tim Sessler (by way of Gothamist). Sessler is a DC-based freelance video editor, and he explains his video, “Shot within a couple hours on a sunny Saturday afternoon, ‘Bending Sounds’ is a test/experiment to capture the inspirational sounds and visuals of the NYC subway.” It’s a little bit haunting, a little bit creepy and a little bit romantic. Give it a watch with some headphones on for the full aural experience.

The J and Z's Chamber Street stop is one that many vote as their least favorite in the system. (Photo by flickr user ciamabue)

A few weeks ago, my work offices moved from the Grand Central area to Times Square, and my morning commute shifted as well. Instead of exiting the East Side IRT through the southern bowels of the ugly 42nd St. stop, the end of my morning commute involves a walk over the platforms that connect the Shuttle at Times Square — the original IRT 42nd St. stop — to the West Side line. The Track 4 platform continues to the north, and a small area of the original platform remains unused.

Despite the hustle and bustle of that Times Square station, seemingly at all hours of the day and night, it’s one of my favorite in the system for its history and complexities. It’s a labyrinth of passageways that stretch from 44th St. and 8th Ave. to 40th and Broadway. It connects the IND, the BMT and the IRT lines at the center of the city, and it features a great vantage point for watching the West Side IRT trains stream past the shuttle platform and into and out of its station.

For every Times Square, though, there’s a Chambers St. underneath 1 Centre St. For every well-maintained and recently-renovated station, there’s an equally dingy one that needs more than just a little TLC. Unfortunately, decades of deferred maintenance means those in need of attention far outnumber those that look passably well maintained.

In my neck of the woods, for instance, Grand Army Plaza is the only station in good shape. The two 7th Ave. stations — one at 9th St. and one at Flatbush — need work, and the Union St. stop at 4th Ave. just is. It’s not in awful shape, but it’s not particularly nice. That’s the public perception of our vast and vital subway system.

Last week, I posed a random question to my Twitter followers: “What’s your least favorite subway stop?” The answers were creative. Let’s look at a sampling.

@SecondAveSagas Bowery should’ve been condemned on sanitary reasons over 30 years ago. It’s perpetually disgusting.

— skormos (@skormos) March 13, 2012

@SecondAveSagas Canal Street on the J/Z. Dirty, creepy, narrow, and difficult to get to from the other Canal platforms.

— Chaim Dauermann (@notclam) March 13, 2012

@SecondAveSagas Herald Square. It’s always a zoo, poorly designed and filthy.

— Will Davidian (@willDavidian) March 13, 2012

@SecondAveSagas Court St on the R. Deep underground, narrow platform, rickety elevator, feels dank and a little dangerous.

— Phil Catelinet (@PhilCatelinet) March 13, 2012

@SecondAveSagas west 4th street in the summer, excruciatingly hot and smelly

— Dumb Yankees Cat (@leokitty) March 13, 2012

I posted the same question on Facebook and received a similarly varied response. Of course, a few stations stick out. The West 4th St. stop is generally in terrible shape, and the lower level platforms are indeed hot and smelly during the summer. Canal St., despite a recent renovation, shows the wear and tear of constant use and abuse. The Chambers St. and Bowery stations along the BMT Nassau Line are creepy and decaying. The unused set of tracks at Canal St. and the Bowery add to the seediness of it all.

These stations are the public faces of the subway system. It’s what daily straphangers live with and walk through every day during their commutes, and it’s how tourists come to view the New York City subway system. It’s a seemingly impossible task, with money tight and time working against it, to keep the system looking clean, but so much of it is in bad shape. Without the political support, it won’t get better, and we’ll be left with only a glimpse of the history and progress at crown-jewel stations while the rest of the system suffers.

While in this post, I’ve highlighted a few responses to my query, I’d love to hear more. Feel free to chime in with your least favorite subway station (or your favorite, for that matter). We all have our various reasons for liking and hating some of those 468 stops out there.

From the folks who bring us the annual No-Pants Subway Ride comes “The Sleeper Car.” Improve Everywhere, as part of an exhibit sponsored by the Guggenheim Museum, recently took over one car on the N train and turned into, well, not quite a classic sleeper car. The group explains:

For our latest mission we converted a New York City subway car into a “sleeper car,” giving New Yorkers the chance to rest their heads during a late night commute. We set up three beds, each outfitted with a comforter, pillow, and sheets. Pajamas, sleep masks, and earplugs were also provided as part of this unauthorized free service. The project took place on the above-ground N train in Astoria, Queens around midnight on a Sunday evening.

With the overly bright lighting and often-deafening volume of the pre-recorded announcements, sleeping on the R160s can be a bit of a challenge, but with the help of some sleep masks and beds, a few intrepid commuters managed to pull it off here. While I’ve pooh-poohed the No-Pants ride lately, I’m entertained by this one.

For more on this mission, produced as a part of the stillspotting nyc exhibit, check out Improv Everwhere’s blog post. They say they believe it isn’t against NYC Transit Rules of Conduct to bring a seat (or bed) on the subway, but I’m a bit skeptical of that claim.

Covering the ins and outs of transit news isn’t necessarily a sexy business. The vast majority of New Yorkers couldn’t care less about safety regulations, debt financing, bond issuances or the behind-the-scenes politics of the MTA Board. The stories that sell rather focus on MTA waste and bloat, fare hikes and infrastructure expansion. It’s far easier to understand and cover a story about a bunch of seemingly altruistic politicians who are trying to save something that likely doesn’t need to be saved — in a recent case, a successful five-stop extension of the G train into Brooklyn — than it is to explain how a decades-long pattern of divestment has led the MTA to be up debt’s creek without a paddle.

Lately, as I’ve tried to understand why transit isn’t more of an issue in local New York politics, as I’ve tried to understand how a small cadre of anti-transit folks, some NIMBYs, some not, have dominated the storylines, I find myself routinely looking at media coverage of transit. It’s been, in a word, disappointing.

Let’s take a story that appeared in the Monday New York Times. As we’ve heard on and off, the MTA often has to fight pigeons that like to roost in its open infrastructure. Some of the old el structures make for comfortable birds’ nests, and the droppings can be both disgusting to people and corrosive to metal. The street-level area on Roosevelt Island is particularly prone to pigeons, and the MTA has deployed a bird whistle to keep these flying rodents away.

The $375 whistles are a creative use of resources that could solve a quality-of-life and subway cleanliness problem. The Times decide it was worth a 700-word article in the New York section. Meanwhile, State Senate Republics are threatening to deny the MTA enough state funding to qualify for a billion-dollar loan for the federal government, thus jeopardizing the future of the Second Ave. Subway and East Side Access project. Plus, the head of the MTA promised fare hikes in 2013 and 2015 simply so the MTA has enough money to pay off its future pension and health care obligations. Those happenings have warranted zero words of coverage in the so-called paper of record.

Of course, once The Times picks up something, it spreads like wildfire. WABC and WNBC both re-reported the news about the bird whistle as though it weren’t something the MTA had been trying for months. It’s not a big story; it’s not going to impact riders; but it’s getting attention because The Times can drive the dialogue.

So should the Grey Lady be a driver of the news? Does The Times have a responsibility to report the news and distill complicated stories into items casual readers can understand? I think they do, and I also think that one of the reasons why New York voters aren’t as clued into transit issues as they should be rests with the stories that get coverage. Print journalism is a business, after all, and headline-grabbing tales of overtime abuse or kitschy bird whistles sells better than a diatribe on bond finances and the history of MTA debt.

Ultimately, though, the transit system is too important to go ignored. We can’t just cover the news when a fare hike looms or when the MTA is forced to cut service. The tales emerging out of Albany concerning GOP Senators playing Russian Roulette with the MTA’s capital funding warrant front-page stories. It impacts everyone from the transit-devoted among us to the person who needs the Q train to get from Midtown to Midwood. But New Yorkers can’t view transit as a major political issue because it isn’t covered like one. So how do we change that dialogue? It can’t all be about bird whistles.