As the NYC subway celebrates 120 years, a look at its influence on culture

NEW YORK — Sunday marks 120 years since the New York City subway system opened to the public.
There’s a tempo when hopping on the subway that doesn’t only come from the trains themselves. You might, in fact, hear musicians slapping to the beat of their own drum, and there’s a pulse from subway cars that vibrate through neighborhoods.  
There’s a culture underground, and it means something to the millions of riders who rely on the subway.
Led Black – a writer, blogger and entrepreneur who grew up in Washington Heights – says he can attest to the energy which emerges from above and from down under.
The 191st Street stop on the 1 line, the deepest subway station in the city, sparked his appreciation for the “iron horse.” The MTA says the station sits 173 feet below street level. The only way to access the platform from Saint Nicholas Avenue is by elevator, or traversing through a nearly 1,000-foot art- and graffiti-filled tunnel from Broadway.
“This is my home stop. I’ve spent so much of my youth here. Coming to these walls and seeing the art on it, it’s always mind-blowing,” Black said.
Black has spent his entire life riding the subway and most notably remembers a different time, when trains were a bit murky.
Transit advocate Lisa Daglian says the 1970s were a rough stretch.
“They were gritty, and they were dirty… So much attention has been paid to making sure that there’s funding to keep up the infrastructure and also the look,” she said.
But Black says, in spite of its setbacks, “it’s just integral, vital and indispensable… I remember taking the 4 train and looking out the window, in the car and out the window, and it was all this art.”
Not everyone saw the subway’s image favorably during that time.
Crime also played a part, resulting in low ridership. Historians say by September of 1979, there were as many as 250 felonies per week, making the crime rate higher than any other mass transit system in the world.
But Concetta Bencivenga, director of the New York Transit Museum, says the subway’s gritty past has shaped today’s culture.
“There are very few examples in our culture, in modern culture, where you can see a snippet of something or hear a bit of sound and then just know, oh, that’s New York,” she said.
An example of that is when hip-hop music began taking off in 1973 in the Bronx.
Black says he remembers hip-hop and its culture quickly becoming part of the subway’s identity.
Today, the liveliness of this mammoth of a system has become undoubtedly iconic. Appearing in films, TV shows, music videos and, more recently, in social media posts.
“It becomes almost like a tapestry of the city. Without the trains’ omnipresence, you don’t really have a city,” Black said.