“The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down, the people ride in a hole in the ground.”

Well, don’t they now…

Say you’re going to dig a hole in the ground. A tunnel you’ll be asking people to go into. Lots of people, and they’ll be spending time down there, maybe an hour or two each day.  Would you…make your tunnel as narrow as possible and give it low ceilings? Keep it dimly lit with no glimpse of the sun above? Would you let runoff rainwater drain in so your tunnel becomes sewer-like, in the lanes where rats run at people’s feet? Would you let a century’s worth of grime develop grotesque tales on platforms and station walls? And go, “but we’ll put up some tile decorations and terra cotta doohickies. Call it art.” For its walls, would you choose the same white tiles used the world over in public urinals, which your hole in the ground would indeed frequently become?

Other than the eternity we’ll spend there when we shuffle off this coil, our species was not designed for the underground (or we’d have enormous eyes and slither on our bellies). Which means if you’re a polite, friendly metropolis you’ll make a conscious effort to keep your subway system as comfortable as possible for your citizens, to disguise as best you can their fact of being interred when they travel from the Battery to the Bronx. The intrinsic grace of high vaults and arches comes to mind; suffusing natural light through platforms and stations with skylights and glass domes wouldn’t be a lousy idea; since neon proved back in the ’30s that lighting could be fun, it might relieve the inherent underground gloom; and what about attractive, clear signage, refuse-free trackbeds and a good go over every once in a while with elbow grease and Comet? And couldn’t one also, in theory, display art that wasn’t composed solely of mosaic tiles, as if a city ordinance signed by someone’s cigar-chomping great-grandfather restricted all subway decoration to an outdated motif? (Nothing against the MTA’s mosaics and terracotta doohickies; they give a fine sense of ol’ 19-Ought-4, inspiring one to raise a toast to Teddy and maybe give those suffragettes a second thought.)

I don’t think there’s any way to deny that, aesthetically speaking, New York’s subways are either a travesty or a tragedy, depending on how psychologically affected by them you are. So why did such an ambitions town build 232 miles of track that wants to starve its citizens of every amenity sixty seconds’ worth of thought can envision?

I’ll never forget the first time I rode the subway, in 1985. I sported a new wave mullet, probably, and the women around me matched pinks with greens. It was my second subway experience ever, following six weeks I’d spent in Paris contemplating l’existence and perfecting a shoulder slouch, but also admiring the clean rush of efficiency that was le Metro. I guess I expected something similar when I visited New York, never having seen such subway-bashing movies as The Taking of Pelham One Two Three or Bananas. But New York in 1985 was still the Land that Western Civilization Forgot, and the subways were its smelliest, graffiti-encrusted, hoodlum-skulking worst. After having ridden the Metro’s cushioned (!) seats all over Paris, in New York I became convinced the MTA and city planners were amateurs and thugs. Train cars bounced like cans kicked along the curb by a bully, had no air conditioning and only a percentage of working lights, and were prone to interminable mid-tunnel halts without any explanation over the intercom, which wasn’t working anyway. Fun times, fun times…

So again – what happened, and what continues to happen, to make the New York subways so excessively…bad? It’s not like there aren’t prettier girls at the party. Stockholm put more than 60 seconds’ worth of thought into subway design and found a way to turn holes in the ground into lovely, amusing holes in the ground. With massive chandeliers, flowing vaults and baroque detailing, Moscow built a series of opera houses for its passengers to commute through. And not to be outdone by its former Soviet comrades, even Kazakhstan has built a subway that makes New York’s look cast off and forgotten, by comparison.

But in a city of such grand ambitions, the ironic root of our subway’s abysmal ugliness has been a lack of any ambition at all. It’s not that the original architects and builders couldn’t do lovely – in fact, they built themselves a trophy wife in one of the very first stations, City Hall. The City lavished her with Romanesque vaults, colored glass tile work, latticed skylights and even brass chandeliers (for when they dined on caviar and duckling while waiting for the 6?). She was unfortunately on the diminutive side though, unable to take longer trains, so the City walled her up in 1945.

While our hole in the ground was being fed thin scraps of architectural sustenance, the city flung itself busily into the air in magnificent ways: the first skyscrapers, the Chrysler and Seagram’s and the other splendid buildings, and indeed the world’s most famous skyline until Hong Kong got senselessly rich and stole that title in the ‘90s. Didn’t it seem proper to achieve below ground, for its citizens, the same level of esteem it so vigorously flexed to the world? Where was, quite frankly, the City’s inner pride?

I’ve since seen The Taking of Pellham 1-2-3, (original version; the royal we doesn’t do remakes), The Warriors and Death Wish, and our friend the subway apparently embedded itself in creative imagination as a place where villains and tormented citizens are ferried along menacing destinies, as if Greek mythology had built Hades in 1904 and slightly renovated it in the ’70s. The pre-I-Heart-NY subways were akin to the dirty bacchanalia of Times Square, in that it served a purpose that was definitely not beautiful, not grand, but maybe significant in other ways. And other than graffiti-less trains and metro card kiosks, nothing much has changed since then. It’s a place where we chew on our woes, ride that train with our fellow melancholics in the city we may or may not heart but which weighs on us daily in many subliminal ways: the closeness, the press of strange crowds, the absence of nature, the rat race like a contagious heart attack, the threat of crime in former eras and the financial trap of our current one, grime and filth, August, February, the legless and pregnant beggars, the unconscionably rich, the half-naked girls at the first blush of summer, our occasional disgust for other human beings, random arguments with average strangers, the greed of others that leaches our blood…

The most powerful aesthetic experiences on the subway are those moments when the local and express trains ride side by side in the tunnel and we gaze through windows at an analogous underworld version of ourselves – other versions of ourselves, with other bodies, other pains, other fates – riding that parallel train with the same expression of emptiness, of suspension in time, of bearing the weight of the city above us. In that narrow, unlit hole in the ground, we experience something unlit about ourselves; unsmiling, unpretentious, unloving (yet in a heartbeat giving our seats to the pregnant and the old). The subway is a destination: it’s the place we go when we travel to and from our jobs, our families, accompanied by the things that penetrate us but that we can’t wear in front of bosses and mothers and the checkout people at Trader Joe’s. We have seen the subway, and it is us…

So is it possible to really imagine a New York City – this city, not some alternative dreamed up by recent mayors – with a subway where Charles Bronson didn’t have to vigilante some thugs and Bernie Goetz didn’t have to imitate him, composed of miles and miles of clean tracks and elegant stations for happy New Yorkers of all ilk to contentedly await their transportation? Would that sparkling metro have fit into and appeased the rough, dirty edges of a moody city that spent the better part of its cocky youth and cranky middle age mocking every town that wasn’t it, and happily bullying outsiders? Or would such a subway be a thumb in the eye to this town that – wait a minute – isn’t a nice, polite, amiable town after all?

But here we are, early-ish in a new century, caught between two worlds: old New York and new NYC. Brooklyn is more Austin than it is New York, and immigrants from far flung states – Dakotas, maybe, or South Idaho – have come in droves and found jobs and changed the blood in the City’s veins. New blood, quick blood, warm blood that smiles and waves like a neighbor…at first, anyway. The people on the subway most likely to rob us are no longer knife-wielding goons but Wall Street masters who influence flows of capital. And in a city as rich as this one has become, with either the privilege or the stress such wealth places on us all, do we all, maybe, deserve a few chandeliers in our subways? Some vaulted ceilings or clean space-age designs? Rat-free tracks to stare down into while we ponder the day? Or how about some art (no more mosaics, please) that we’d love at home but most of us can never afford?

So please, New York: if I’m going to descend into your psyche every day and ride around its tunnels, could you maybe try to make it a healthier, happier place? Just saying.