This is the last stop on this train.
When the police boarded the train for the second time, it was unclear whether they had been summoned in response to the man smoking on the train or the maskless gentleman who was still on board after the police settled his near-fistfight a few stops back. It was obvious, however, that the trip I sold to my unsuspecting friends as an “historic, once-in-a-lifetime subway experience” had devolved into what even the most seasoned passengers would have to concede was an astonishing spectacle.
We considered moving to another car but decided that it was not worth it if we would have to stand for the rest of the trip. Manhattan real estate is a fierce game, and subway seats are as much a part of the playing field as anything.
In the fistfight man’s defense, a train nerd — one evidently unaware of the local custom of not engaging with maskless lunatics on the subway — had informed him of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s policy on the matter of masks. It is the rare subway madman who demonstrates interest in the policies of state agencies and, rather than wear a mask, he nearly got into a fistfight with the train nerd.
“We are being held in the station by the train’s dispatcher,” the conductor insisted to the rest of the train, but those of us watching the fight knew the truth.
So began one of the final journeys of the R-32, a type of subway train that has faithfully served New Yorkers since 1964. That they name trains after the contract numbers under which they are purchased may not suggest that the people who run the subway have a great sense of sentimentality, but the MTA put on a series of “retirement rides” for the trains over the last few Sundays. Even in the middle of winter during a plague, people came out in great numbers to ride the trains one last time.
Less than a quarter of households in Manhattan own a car. It makes sense that many people should feel the same fondness for an old train that I felt for, say, my old minivan that I drove until it conked out during my first quarter of college. Sure, I had to throw my whole body weight against the passenger doors to get them to close and it only got fourteen miles to the gallon, but it was a good and faithful machine.
I remember my first time riding an R-32. I was in high school and we were on a family spring break trip to New York. (From a young age, I exhibited no real interest in other spring break destinations and once threatened to drive the beloved family minivan off a bridge if my sister got her way and I had to go to Florida. I stand by this.) The rest of the family had sent me off on my own (who can say why they would do such a thing?) and I was wandering around the city, enjoying the greatest sense of freedom that I had ever felt. I do not know where I was going, but I remember stumbling onto an R-32 and suspecting that the train itself must have been around to greet Henry Hudson when he first arrived in the area.
The retirement ride crowd was mostly composed of history buffs, subway geeks, sentimental transit functionaries, and a group of people that my grandfather — a man who spent the better part of his career in railroads — calls “foamers,” referring to what happens to their mouths in the presence of trains. (The easiest way to determine if somebody is an ordinary subway geek or a foamer is to check if they have brought a tripod with them for the occasion.)
The atmosphere was festive at the start. The train had a leftover holiday wreath hanging on the front. The maps in the train had been changed out to historic copies from 1964 with the route to the World’s Fair highlighted. A small group stood at the front, angling to get a view out of the front window on one of the last subway trips ever to include such a thing (the R-32 was the last train to include a front-facing view for passengers).
As the train pulled out of the station under the Lower East Side and started its trip to Harlem, everything seemed to be perfect. One of us remarked, “This is wonderful!” This is always a dangerous thing to say. New York is itself a complex machine, and it is constantly attuned to indications of overt happiness. New York knows when you are happy, and it strikes you down.
It was moments later that the first fight broke out. By the second time that the police boarded the train, we realized the error of our ways and decided not to make any more remarks about our joy, which seemed to keep catastrophe at bay for the rest of the trip uptown.
The train turned around at 145th Street and a new cast of characters boarded. We rode the train back down to 34th Street — 111 blocks — in relative peace. At 42nd Street, though, we watched a woman board the train and, on realizing it was a retirement journey, cry out, “this is delightful.” When we left the train at the next stop to find something to eat, the doors closed as a man in a Biden mask and a man in a “Let’s all pretend this mask is useful” mask were in the early stages of a yelling match. The city strikes again.
It would be easy to say that people, with their lack of decorum, had ruined the R-32’s retirement ride. I do not think this is the case. A lot happens in New York in fifty-eight years. The R-32 carried New Yorkers through all kinds of chaos, from the City’s near-bankruptcy to the general mayhem of the 1970s and 80s and everything beyond. In light of all that the mighty R-32 has witnessed, it makes perfect sense that, in its final days, the train should get to experience a bunch of people getting into fights in a pandemic.
The very last run of the R-32 was last Sunday night at 6:30. The last train would run along the Q line from 96th Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan to Brighton Beach, where Brooklyn meets the Atlantic Ocean, one in three people do not speak English, and the signs in shops are often written in Cyrillic. The trip was symbolic, with the oldest train starting in the newest subway station and running on a journey that otherwise mirrored the first one that it made in 1964.
The Atlantic is the train’s destination in more ways than one. The MTA has made a habit of throwing old train cars into the ocean. It is a cheaper way of disposing of them, provides an artificial reef for sea life, and the water neutralizes the harmful effects of asbestos from the older cars.
The one-way trip was well more than an hour, and I debated whether it was worth the trouble, eventually deciding that I would not be able to live with myself if I skipped a subway extravaganza starting on a platform that is a five-minute walk from my kitchen. It was worth it.
There were no fights on the very last run of the R-32. It was, in fact, an atmosphere unlike anything I had ever seen on the subway. A crowd gathered on the platform at 96th Street, waiting. There were children wearing t-shirts with their favorite subway line. A man carried his dog in a bag. A family in matching Q train hats huddled together. There was a quiet decorum until the train arrived, and then the crowd went wild. The motorman blew the horn triumphantly. People yelled and applauded. Foamers foamed. Children shrieked.
As the train lurched forward and began its journey to the sea, the crowd broke out into applause again. The conductor came over the loudspeakers and gave his regular address (in a perfect accent) about this being a Brooklyn-bound Q train, about federal law requiring masks (not that anyone needed a reminder this time around), and then gave a series of remarks on the train’s fifty-eight years of loyal service to New Yorkers.
The great machine rumbled its way downtown, passing under Central Park, Times Square, the Flatiron Building, and Chinatown. Along the way, it picked up more people who were delighted to take part in the affair and a few who were confused to find their Sunday evening train was both ancient and packed with people.
Parents in the seats across from me took pictures of their toddler. The person next to me read from a book on the history of the subway and listened to a Spotify playlist he had assembled for just this occasion. A man with a University of Michigan scarf and an NYC Department of Transportation lanyard hanging out of his pocket took videos. People carried the horrible, cheap umbrellas that vendors sell outside of stations when it rains. Workers in MTA safety vests and steel-toed boots looked around wistfully.
Canal Street is the last stop on the line in Manhattan, after which the train crosses the Manhattan Bridge into Brooklyn. The crossing is one of the most beautiful parts of the subway system. Even on a normal day, commuters tend to look up from their phones and peer out the windows as casually as they can.
Shortly after the train left Canal Street, somebody started playing music. The speakers were tinny and the quality was terrible, but the song was eventually recognizable as Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York.” The train emerged from miles of dark tunnel and trundled up the long ascent to the bridge, over the vast Lower East Side. Everyone turned to look out the window as we left Manhattan for the last time and the music hit its peak. Lower Manhattan — framed by the Brooklyn Bridge — was all lit up and still visible through the fog.
The Brighton Line comes down from the Manhattan Bridge in Brooklyn and runs through more tunnels and then through a sort of trench before it comes above ground again on its approach to the sea. Somewhere in the trench bit is Cortelyou Road, a local stop named for my great great great great great great great great great great great (that’s eleven greats for the folks counting at home) grandfather, Jacques Cortelyou. He was the Surveyor General of Nieuw Amsterdam under Peter Stuyvesant in the 1600s and was the first person to commute between Brooklyn and Manhattan, which he did in a rowboat. In 1660, he completed the Castello Plan, a very early map of Lower Manhattan. The subway — much less a stop named after him — would have blown his mind.
It was just after Cortelyou Road that a man in an MTA vest standing at the end of the car broke his hourlong silence. “This is it,” he said to nobody in particular. “This is really the end.”
We started talking and I learned that he had been on the various retirement rides all day. His feet were tired, but it was worth it. During the week, he was an engineer, working on maintaining every type of subway car in the fleet, which he had done for more than a decade. Each R-32 car, he estimated, had run for three million miles. “And that’s not to mention how many times they open and close these doors. They’re still as sturdy as ever, even after they added air conditioners in the ’80s. Good trains.”
Sheepshead Bay is the last stop before Brighton Beach. As the train left the station, the people who were lucky enough to get seats rose. Maybe it was to prepare to get off at the last stop, but it had the sort of unified air of people rising to sing a hymn. One video on social media showed passengers in another car standing and chanting together. “R-32! R-32! R-32!”
More crackly Sinatra started playing. This time, it was “My Way,” and it became clear that the sound was coming not from anyone’s phone, but from the conductor, who was playing it through the train’s speakers as if the train itself was reflecting on facing the final curtain as it approached the sea.
The doors slid open to a round of raucous applause at Brighton Beach. People patted the stainless steel exterior of the train like an old friend. The train was split apart so that more motormen could have a chance to drive their own piece off to the depot. Parents lifted their children up to the window of the cab so that they could reach in and blow the horn. The last of the R-32s did victory laps up and down the line for a while.
I got on a Q train back to Manhattan. It was the same kind of train that I ride every day. I think it is an R-seventy-something. I don’t know. I don’t usually keep track of these things.
That the R-32 has a front window or a stainless steel body or very durable doors or unusually powerful brakes is not of particular importance. Once you take away the technical details, a subway car is a minimalist room with wheels. There are fluorescent lights and advertisements and a few seats, but it is more of a blank canvas than anything else. The people are the interesting bit.
“A poem,” E. B. White wrote, “compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines.” The subway compresses everything again — and the subway adds Sinatra and air conditioning.
The whole event was, I thought to myself as we slid back into the tunnels and toward the bridge back, absolutely perfect. At that very moment, naturally, somebody pulled the emergency brake.
Distractions
Things I have been reading, watching, and listening to this week.
New York, New York by Warren Wallace and Andy Rooney, originally broadcast on CBS.
Sticking with a theme of mid-century New York, this film — or these films, perhaps — were broadcast on CBS in 1974. The R-32 had been running for a decade. CBS, interested in doing a documentary on the city, had Warren Wallace (a Michigan native) do a 30-minute piece on urban decay in New York and Andy Rooney (of 60 Minutes fame) prepare a rebuttal. Rooney referenced his film, In Praise of New York, as being one of his favorite works even years later. The films were broadcast together, one after the other.
They are products of their time, and they are shown here with original advertisements for dishwashers and over-the-counter pain relievers during the breaks.
The University of Michigan Board of Regents removed President Mark Schlissel last weekend after he “used his University email account to communicate with that subordinate in a manner inconsistent with the dignity and reputation of the University.”
In the spirit of transparency, the Board has released all of the relevant communications. One of the great pleasures of living in a democracy is that the emails of the mighty are so often released after they fall. The rule of professional email as I have learned it is that one must always assume that anything they write will be printed in the papers. Most interns learn this on their first day. That the president of an enormous university seems to have missed the memo is mystifying. If a person insists on having inappropriate relationships with their subordinates, it would surely not be too much trouble to do so with a Gmail address.
If the former president is the loser here, the reading public are the real winners. Something is thrilling about reading released emails. The material is both scandalous and completely boring. It is a tremendous combination.
Particular favorites include a bizarre salad order (Michigan cherry salad, no onion, add green peppers), the former president’s explanation of the concept of a knish, praise of JetBlue’s free WiFi, and an upside-down photograph of an Italian market.