The Case for Fancier Subways: We Deserve Them

The governor is too much in love with frills, not the unsexy nuts and bolts of keeping up the subway system.

It is as if the place is melting.

You could look at that mess, and think, no wonder Mayor Bill de Blasio said, “We’re going to continue to make the point that we don’t like the direction the MTA is taking, and we’re going to be speaking up about it. The countdown clocks and the Wi-Fi and painting, having lights on bridges — all that stuff doesn’t matter compared to your subway actually arriving where it’s supposed to arrive on time.”

But what if the exact opposite is true?

What if the problem is that our subway stations and all our infrastructure are not treated as public treasures, and are instead too utilitarian, too trampled, so purposefully unpleasant that no one cares when things are going wrong until the whole place starts falling down?

There is a fair dispute between the governor and the mayor over which stations most urgently need to be improved; each side has different lists. That is a different question than doing these upgrades at all.

The realist or pragmatist or hard-nosed faction might allow that these upgrades are “nice” to have but not until the trains run on time. So cutting out the “frills” is a form of triage: tough love.

Really?

Put aside the “art for art’s sake” viewpoint, and consider “art for utilitarianism’s sake.”

The difference between plug ugly and outright decay is often hard to see. That particular stop at 205th Street has been an advancing shambles for years, but that is just what we are trained to expect. Fresh paint, better lighting, the supposedly froufrou bells and whistles might have worked as alarm bells and whistles as water seeped in behind the walls.

Grumbling about countdown clocks, as the mayor has, is a privilege reserved to people who are not regularly stuck on a platform, unsure when or if a train is coming. These clocks are still buggy, but they are in place now — three years sooner than expected — because of clever hacks.

The clocks are a statement. They ratchet up the level of what we are allowed to expect about service.

What about the fancier stuff?

A renovation at the Bleecker Street station of the No. 6 line that included a neon light installation cost $135 million, twice as much as estimated. Five new elevators were built to make the station accessible for people who can’t use stairs, and the platform was extended to create a new transfer to the adjacent Broadway-Lafayette stop of the B, D, F and M lines.

The cost of the neon sculpture was $255,000 — or less than two-tenths of 1 percent of the money spent on the project. No piece of art can please everyone, but this one is a bold and unmistakable presence in the station.

Along the stops of the new Second Avenue extension are murals and mosaics, spectacles that declare themselves for stations that are supposed to be here 100 years from now.

One night a few years back, I passed beneath the High Bridge that crosses the Harlem River between the Bronx and Manhattan, as I have as boy and man for most of 60 years. That night was the first time I saw it lit. The High Bridge is the original, most enduring, and the greatest of all the city’s built infrastructure. Its completion in 1842, under the direction of John Jervis, allowed fresh water to be brought from north of Manhattan into the city, at a moment when the island’s population was withering because all the native supply had been spoiled or depleted.

Its construction was the Genesis moment of modern New York.

Jervis had designed it in the style of a Roman aqueduct. Until that evening, when I saw its graceful stone arches laced with light from LEDs, I had never given it more than a moment’s thought.

Make things beautiful, and they will last — or at least have a fighting chance to stare down neglect.

Not long ago, when leaks were staining the facades of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the New York Public Library building on Fifth Avenue, people were horrified; after all, think of the great artwork and literature housed in these places. We don’t let such beautiful things deteriorate.

A brown-rust stain in a subway station? Ehh. After all, it’s just us in there.

Just so.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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