I’ve ridden a lot of trains at rush hour in NYC. The least crowded was the PATH to Jersey, because I was taking it in reverse, since nobody actually lives in Brooklyn and works in Jersey. I regularly had an entire car to myself. The ads were the best part: one advertised condos in Hoboken by pointing out that if you live on the Jersey waterfront, you get to look at the Manhattan skyline, whereas is you live in Manhattan, you have to look at Jersey. They had a point. Another ad proclaimed, “Have you talked to your kids about drugs? Because their friends are.” The grammatical problems with these two sentences made me grind my teeth for a year.
The exact opposite of this advertising meditation commute was taking the 456 uptown from 14th Street at nine in the morning. I’ve never seen anything like it outside of dystopian-future cinema. A lucky day involved getting down the stairs and making the third train. Often, there was a line just to get to the head of the stairs, and you could spend five minutes on them before you got to the platform below. When there was room for them, MTA officials would move people around and clear entrances with flashlights and shouting. I mentioned the tipping point previously; that was every second on the 456 line once you got close to it.
People snapped on a regular basis. I witnessed the most impotent fight of all time, as two men yelled at each other over the impenetrable press of people between them, unable even to make a threatening gesture because their hands were pinned to their sides. Once when I was working my way to an acceptable spot on the train, I briefly got caught on a woman’s purse. She yanked it away angrily and shouted, “Excuse me is a word!” This is false, but I wasn’t going to correct her in such an unstable environment.
The 456 at 14th is also the loudest of all train stops, reaching 106 decibals, which starts causing hearing damage after 30 seconds. The screeching achieved by every single train is equivalent to having headphones made out of two hungry babies. People who just say, “gimme a second” into their cell phones and don’t blink when multiple ambulances go by still flinch when a slow 6 train pulls into 14th Street.
If you’re not from the city, the 456 is the green line on the subway map. Avoid.