The Joys of the Subway

The subway is what makes Manhattan fun and functional. Trains run frequently during the day and they run fast. One hears about stoppages as one hears of other rare natural disasters like earthquakes and tornadoes. There's the 7-day unlimited pass for $25 that is a tremendous bargain, while taxi rides are each $5-10 around town.

The routes do take some getting used to. To correlate the subway map and the surface street map, and the 'house' numbers, requires two maps and some asking for help. The stations are 2 blocks long, minimum, and where routes cross, the stations are connected in ways that are topologically interesting and not always predictable. Signage is designed for the cognoscenti. One quickly learns that "uptown" means more or less north, or away from Wall Street, and "downtown" is of course toward the southern tip of Manhattan. It is possible to get slightly lost in these stations. Asking for directions is usually but not always helpful.

Google is useful, but so are the people on the street. Someone wearing work clothes and toting a work-related container generally knows the neighborhood.

So we take a subway map and a street map, and consult them often. It makes transfers easy, and makes the travel efficient. It's great fun to figure out efficient connections. Still, there are moments.

Such as when we are standing in the Times Square station at 11 pm waiting for a B train that will take us straight home. There's a sign saying "no B trains 12:30-5:30 am." We wait. At 11:25 it dawns on us that the times on the sign are approximate; maybe the last B train has to be in the barn way out in Queens by 12:30, and it's already gone past. So we trudge over to the other side of the station and take a 1 train, which comes in 4 minutes, as usual. In 6 more minutes we're walking along the sidewalks toward home.

Or when we are descending into a new station. The signage is slightly unclear here, and we are heading for the E train. I say to a man, "Is this the way to the uptown train?" "Yes," he says, "down these stairs and to the left." We stand peacefully on the platform; an E arrives, we get on it. But the station names don't fit the sequence on the map.

I inspect the map. We took a downtown train, and are 3 stations into Brooklyn. But the solution is simple. We leave the train at that stop, cross the platform, and take the next E in the 'tother direction. We lose ten minutes and have no appointments to keep, except with our stomachs in a nice inexpensive restaurant.

Another day, we are hurrying to get to the Cloisters, so we walk up to the express stop at 96th to take the train to 168th, another express stop, where we can transfer to the A, up to 190th. At the 96th St. station, we arrive at precisely the right moment. On our left, there's an express train, on the right a local. I jump on the express, gloating a bit at our good fortune. Izzie tags along. The doors close, both trains accelerate.

I look up at the lighted route board above the windows. Oops. This express route turns east into Queens. It's a long five minutes to the next stop, Central Park North. We cross the platform there and catch the next train back to 96th, where we wait for another 1 train. I am feeling more constricted on time and less in a hurry, if you get my drift.

But when it works well, it really works. We're on the upper West Side at the Guggenheim, and want to go to Chinatown. The express 4 at 86th takes us down to Canal Street in about 12 minutes. When done there, we walk over the Ground Zero, then take the E to West Greenwich Village for lunch, then take the local C back home. Fast, efficient, no traffic jams, short waits for trains. It's a weekday in NYC.

On the other hand, if you want to go across town, the taxi is much faster and always less that $10. Unless it's raining. Then they're all full.

Poor navigation to the Cloisters

We decided Saturday morning that we should visit the medieval-art museum of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Cloisters is atop a picturesque hill at the north tip of Manhattan, purpose-built for the architectural treasures it contains.

But we were somewhat delayed... After breakfast we descended into the 96th street subway station, and had the blessing of 2 trains stopping simultaneously, the express #2 on the left and the local #1 on the right. I said, "Hey, let's take the express to 168th!"

We hopped on. The doors always close within 20 seconds or so, and both trains glided noisily north. I glanced at the route board above the window. What a nice thing this is: it shows all the stops on the line; scheduled stops are lit, past and non-stops are unlit. The first thing I noticed was that 168th street was not on the board. Duh. Wrong train. So we got off at 110th street after the train turned east, and went back to 96th and took the #1 as we should have. Isabelle was polite...

The travel advice was to take #1 to 168th street and there to transfer to the A train, which crosses over the #1, take the A train to Fort George Park, then walk 10 minutes to The Cloisters. I was sorely tempted to simply take the #1 up to Dyckman Street, slightly north of The Cloisters, and obviously closer than walking through the park.

But having made one seriously wrong decision already, I decided to take the road more traveled by, and that made all the difference: we actually got to the Cloisters, and found the walk through the park atop the Hudson River bluffs to be spectacularly beautiful. While we bought tickets at the museum, I asked the clerk if it wouldn't be faster simply to take the #1 from Dyckman Street, with no transfers, when we were done. He strongly opposed this, saying blandly, "It's a long walk on a winding path down the hill, and it's several blocks on streets at the bottom -- not very interesting." One presumes that there's a sinister subtext to "not very interesting" such as "your age and clothing and lack of skin pigmentation are not appropriate for the neighborhood."

It was a beautiful walk back through the park to the subway. We were going to Lincoln Cneter, but decided not to transfer at 168th street to the #1, so we took the A train to Columbus Circle and walked 4 blocks back. A good decision: a nice day for a walk, and we arrived at Columbus Circle, 130 blocks south, 45 minutes after thinking about leaving the Cloisters and 29 minutes after stepping into the elevator for the #1 train.

Oh, yes. The Cloisters. Go if you can. It's a marvelous place in and of itself: For tGeorge Park and the Hudson River Valley and then the architectural details and the statuary and ancient stained glass windows and the paintings and carvings and tapestries and ancient goblets.