The Sensory Commute: Two Bodies Moving Through the City, November 1989

The Clean Fleet and the Unrenovated Station

The D line’s new rolling stock was among the youngest in the system. The R68 cars, built by Westinghouse-Amrail between 1986 and 1988, and the R68A cars, assembled by Kawasaki through 1989, were 75-foot B Division coaches with unpainted brushed-stainless exteriors, red door-frame accents, and blue route identifier strips. They replaced the R10s from 1948, the R27s from 1960, the R30s from 1961 — cars that had been in service across the postwar decades and that had accumulated, across their working lives, a layered crust of grime, paint, and tag work that the MTA had spent most of the 1980s systematically erasing. The R68A entered D revenue service in May 1988. By November 1989, the cars were one to three years old: still new enough that the interior walls carried no scratches, that the molded orange-and-yellow fiberglass bucket seats showed no deep gouge marks, that the cool-white fluorescent tubes running the full ceiling length had not yet yellowed.¹

The 4 line’s situation was different in degree but not in kind. Its R62 cars — built by Kawasaki in Kobe, delivered in 1983–85 — were narrower IRT coaches, 51 feet against the D’s 75, and they had been the system’s first fully graffiti-free line since August 1985. By November 1989 the 4’s clean stainless had been continuous for more than four years. The IRT cars used GE traction motors that produced a rising-pitch electrical whine under acceleration and a steel-on-steel screech through curves. Both lines were air-conditioned, fluorescently lit, and finished with the same institutional aesthetic: orange and yellow seats, bare metal walls, a ceiling bright enough to read under. Neither line had automated announcements. Conductors broadcast live from approximately the fifth car over PA systems that were, by general consensus, low-fidelity to the point of unintelligibility — the standard phrasing (“Stand clear of the closing doors, please”) arriving at the far ends of the car as a smeared crackle in which only the rhythm of the sentence was intact.

The two lines differed most audibly in their door warnings. Before the R68 and R68A closed their doors, they sounded a two-note Westminster chime — a minor-third interval, polite, almost British, borrowed from the idiom of European transit. The R62, before its doors closed, produced a harsh buzzer: a grating, insistent pulse that belonged to the vocabulary of warning rather than of courtesy. The distinction was not in any official manual of transit philosophy. It was a procurement decision, an engineering specification, a consequence of which manufacturer had built which car in which decade. By November 1989 it was simply the sound of the two systems, absorbed without comment by everyone who rode them.

Outbound from Fordham Road

November 1989 was cold in the ordinary way of New York Novembers, the daytime highs settling into the mid-forties through most of the month before a Thanksgiving snowfall — the snowiest Thanksgiving in the city’s recorded history — pushed the temperature to a high of thirty-five and dropped nearly five inches on the sidewalks.² This is to say: a coat was not optional. It was the first thing that morning that announced what you could afford.

On the D platform at Burnside Avenue — elevated, seventy-two years old, corrugated-metal windscreens doing partial duty against the November air — a young woman in her early twenties waited in a black wool-blend coat bought somewhere along the Fordham Road corridor, Burlington Coat Factory on Webster Avenue or Alexander’s at Fordham and the Grand Concourse. The Fordham Road corridor was, by the late 1980s, the largest shopping strip in the Bronx and one of the largest in the city; it was where a family made do. The coat was knee-length, single-breasted, its lining smooth polyester. It was her best coat and she took care of it. Under it: a blazer from Loehmann’s, the chain’s Fordham Road store — by 1989 the largest outlet in the country for off-price women’s wear, a 35,000-square-foot converted skating rink of pipe racks and fluorescent overheads and communal dressing rooms with no partitions. Loehmann’s signature practice, in 1989, was to cut the manufacturer’s label from every garment it sold — slashed, snipped, or mutilated beyond recognition — so that the shopper who bought a blazer there could not say whose name had been inside it without studying the construction. The practice ended in the early 1990s. In November 1989 it was still standard.

The blazer’s fabric was a polyester-wool blend, likely 55/45 or thereabouts, rather than the pure wool crepe of a full-price designer suit. It had a slight sheen that pure wool did not. The interfacing was fusible rather than canvas, giving it a faintly boardy quality that would worsen with cleaning. The hem was machine-stitched rather than blind-hemmed. The buttons were good-quality plastic with a faux-horn texture. Each tell was invisible on its own; the sum was visible from across a well-lit Midtown room to anyone trained to register that kind of detail. The women she was going to meet had. Her editorial assistant salary — somewhere in the range that the magazine industry paid new hires who were expected to have other means, barely above what the city would have recognized as poverty — did not make this easier to correct.³

On her feet, on the platform: white Reebok Freestyle high-tops, the first athletic shoe designed and marketed specifically for women, introduced in 1982 and, by the late 1980s, the sneaker of choice for any woman commuting from the boroughs to a Midtown desk.⁴ The pumps were in the canvas bag over her shoulder. The practice of riding in sneakers and changing at the office dated roughly to the 1980 transit strike, when professional women had walked to work and found, when the trains returned, that they preferred the walking shoe on the platform.³ The 1988 Mike Nichols film Working Girl, with Ann Roth’s costumes, had taken the image — Melanie Griffith in white high-top Reeboks on the Staten Island Ferry, pumps in her bag — and returned it to the culture in the form in which it would persist through the decade: practical, class-marked, universal enough that it had been written into a movie.⁵

The Walkman was a Sony, the budget AM/FM model, black plastic, running on two AA batteries with no Dolby and no auto-reverse, the headphones supra-aural with orange open-cell polyurethane foam pads that sat on the ear rather than around it. The cassette was a Maxell UR-90, Type I normal-bias ferric oxide, hand-labeled in blue ballpoint on a white stick-on. A second-generation dub, taken on a friend’s dual-cassette boombox at 2× speed, of De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising, released on Tommy Boy Records on March 3, 1989.⁶ The Village Voice Pazz & Jop critics’ poll named it the album of 1989.⁷ On a fresh commercial cassette it would have sounded like what Prince Paul had made it: a dense, high-fidelity collage of vinyl samples, digital drum machine, and rapid-fire vocal delivery. On this cassette, after roughly eight months of regular playback, it sounded like something else.

The physics of repeated tape play work in one direction. High frequencies are recorded on the outermost surface of the magnetic coating; as the tape passes the playback head several hundred times, that surface abrades. Oxide particles accumulate on the head itself. Treble attenuates first, progressively, until everything above roughly 10 kHz is essentially gone. What survives is bass — warm, intact, promoted by the disappearance of everything above it — and the lower midrange. Hi-hats go swishy. Snare cracks soften. Prince Paul’s SP-1200 drum machine samples, with their tight digital transients, round off into something warmer and less precise. The album becomes bass-forward, intimate, and unreproducible: a version that existed only on this cassette, shaped by the specific number of times this particular person had listened to it.

The open-back design of the orange-foam pads meant that the music leaked in both directions. Bass was attenuated by 20 to 30 decibels outside the cup; treble by only 8 to 15. What emerged into the subway car — audible only to the passenger in the adjacent seat, and only during the quieter stretches between stations, where the car’s ambient noise fell below the surrounding roar of express travel — was not the album but its skeleton: the upper harmonics of hi-hat patterns, the sibilant consonants of rapping, a faint metallic percussion ghost. Tss-tsk-tss-tsk. The bass that moved her was entirely withheld. The warmth was hers alone.

The ride from Burnside to 59th Street was nine stops and somewhere between twenty-seven and thirty-five minutes depending on the local variables of the morning.¹ The first seven stops were elevated, running above Jerome Avenue through the West Bronx, the old Yankee Stadium passing at 161st Street. Then, north of 149th Street and Grand Concourse, the line dropped underground: daylight to tunnel darkness, open-air clatter to enclosed roar, the cold platform air giving way to the warmer, staler air of the Lexington Avenue express. From 149th south, the 4 ran express, reaching speeds in the low forties at the long stretches between 125th and 86th and 59th, the fluorescent ceiling tubes flickering over rail joints, the conductor’s voice dissolving somewhere in the ductwork.

Inbound from Eighty-Sixth and Lexington

A body that did not have to think about its body left less to notice. The 4 platform at 86th Street was underground, the express level built in 1962, utilitarian tile and brick walls bearing the accumulated grime of nearly three decades. A senior editor — mid-fifties, composite, unnamed, hired in the late 1970s and living in a prewar apartment somewhere in the East Side seventies or eighties — had been riding this platform for the better part of a decade. He wore a full wool topcoat, camel or charcoal, English or Italian-made, purchased in the early 1980s at Paul Stuart on Madison or Brooks Brothers at 346 Madison and worn since. Under it: leather-soled lace-ups, also English or Italian, taken from a shoetree the night before. No bag held a second pair of shoes. No change was planned.

He carried the Times, folded in eighths in the Manhattan straphanger’s idiom, and possibly caught the back of someone’s Daily News across the aisle. The R62’s GE traction motors produced their characteristic rising-pitch whine under acceleration south from 86th; the harsh buzzer sounded before each door closure; the conductor’s announcement dissolved into crackle at his end of the car. These sounds were, for him, the sound of going to work. He did not register the Westminster chime when he rode the D because he did not ride the D. He did not register the R62’s buzzer as a buzzer — it was the door sound, the commute sound, the sound of a system that had always been this way. The cars had always been clean, for him. The 4 had been graffiti-free since August 1985.

He was not, in the four years since the 4 went clean, unchanged. Neither was the city. But the cars and the platforms and the Tuesday mornings had all settled so completely into the texture of the commute that nothing about them was registered as new. He arrived at 59th Street, walked four to six blocks west, crossed the revolving brass door of a Midtown lobby, nodded to the doorman who had known him for a decade. He had not changed his shoes.

Arrival in the Lobby

The lobby was marble: high-ceilinged, dark-wooded at the reception desk, brass at the elevator surrounds, a uniformed attendant positioned near the doors. Mid-morning light came through the glass at a low angle — in late November, even at noon, the sun barely clears twenty-nine degrees off the horizon in Midtown, and the shadows outside were long and directional. Inside, the marble floor produced what every Midtown lobby of the period produced when heels crossed it: an echo, muffled at the walls, arriving back from the far end of the room about a half-second after each footfall.

The editorial assistant had changed in the women’s room one floor up, or on a bench by the wall near the service entrance, Reeboks unlaced and set beside the canvas bag, pumps retrieved and stepped into, the wool overcoat folded on her lap. By the time she crossed the marble, the visible body matched the room. Almost.

The senior editor’s leather-soled lace-up, broken in across nine years of daily use, made a clean, authoritative click on the marble — heel-first, weight forward, the leather sole mating squarely with the stone and separating cleanly. A sound with no hesitation in it. The editorial assistant’s Nine West pump — genuine leather upper, thin corrected-grain, over a composite synthetic sole with a plastic heel stack — made a slightly different sound: a fraction hollower, a touch plasticky in the high frequencies, the resonance of the heel tip not quite matching the stone the way a denser material would. The difference was not the difference between a shoe and a non-shoe. It was the difference between two price ladders and two materials sciences, rendered audible on a hard floor.

The lobby of November 1989 had no working vocabulary for what was happening at floor level. The senior editor heard footsteps crossing marble, which was what footsteps did. The doorman heard something. He had been standing at the far end of this lobby for eleven years and had heard every variation of heel on stone that passed through it — the heavy Blake-stitched English oxford, the thin-soled Italian loafer, the Nine West pump new in September, the same pump by November when the heel tip had worn to a slightly hollow knock. He had organized no taxonomy for what he heard. He had simply heard it, the way a person hears the same room for eleven years and knows, without being able to say how, when something in it has changed. The receptionist, who had been behind her desk since the mid-1970s, heard it precisely. She had no occasion to mention it.

Also drawn on: Joe Austin, Taking the Train: How Graffiti Art Became an Urban Crisis in New York City (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).