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During winters, I would take the F train to school and over summer I would ride it to Coney Island until I could tell which subway station I was approaching by the color of the wall tiles. I would take a breath as the subway train left the dark tunnels, rails sparking and the lights occasionally flickering out, to ascend to the ‘high line’ overlooking McDonald Avenue.
Coney Island-Stillwell Av was the last stop if it was summer or I was playing hooky on a winter beach day. It was also the last stop for Debrina Kawam, a homeless woman, who was sleeping on the train when she was set on fire by a Guatemalan migrant on her last Sunday morning.
Kawam had likely been avoiding the homeless shelters after they were overrun with violent migrants, but it did her no good. The last we saw of her, she was standing and burning, while people walked by or filmed with their phones at the last stop in view of the cold seaside air.
The murder on the F train took place weeks after Daniel Penny, a Marine Corps veteran, had been ‘let off’ after heroically intervening to stop a career maniac, who previously assaulted a number of elderly women with no consequences, restraining him on a Brooklyn bound F train.
The F train is no worse than any other subway line, traveling from Jamaica, Queens to Coney Island, letting you go from JFK Airport right to the beach (or the other way around) but it is the second longest subway route after the A train made famous by Duke Ellington. The F train did not exist yet and in any case ducks out via Roosevelt Island to Queens long before it reaches Harlem or Ellington’s home in Washington Heights which was then reachable by the A train.
The 27 mile length of the route makes the F train a magnet for homeless, scam artists, subway performers and assorted crazies who know that they can enjoy a ride of over an hour and a half (on a good day) with scenic views, three boroughs and a selection of comfortable seats, if you like orange and yellow buckets, with room to stretch out your feet from a window seat.
There was a time when subway personnel walked through the cars, warning anyone putting their feet up, but these days they have far bigger problems, not just old-fashioned pickpockets and muggers, but random stabbings, serial sexual predators who go in and out of the system, and crazies who push waiting riders onto the tracks when they get too close to the yellow line.
On New Year’s Eve, a man was pushed in front of a subway train. He somehow survived the experience with a broken skull. Subway stabbings have become so routine that there were two on New Year’s Day within 20 minutes. The next day an MTA employee was stabbed in the armpit. The only thing still distinguishing today’s subways from the worst days of the seventies and eighties is the lack of car-to-car graffiti that had become typical in that area.
The subway was always a metaphor for New York City. Its trains rushing between the depths of tunnels and the heights overlooking busy streets linked a bewildering city into one whole. Over a hundred years ago, Joyce Kilmer sketched the subway as a collection of “tired clerks, pale girls, street cleaners, business men, boys, priests and harlots, drunkards, students, thieves” thundering “through the dark”, but the balance of power has shifted away from the clerks, girls, boys and business men, over to the drunkards, thieves, along with the killers and the monsters.
The trouble with the subway, as with the city, is that some take it to go somewhere else, while others use it to take advantage of others. Overrun by criminals, homeless and migrants, the subway is no longer a transportation system, but a colony with a permanent population who form a gauntlet that the rest of us have to run in order to get to anywhere else in the city.
Measures like congestion pricing squeeze more people into a violent and dangerous system, but what makes it violent and dangerous is that it all too well reflects a fallen city. The fundamental difference between the city and all other forms of living is density. In towns and villages, the proportion of private space to public space is weighted toward the individual, but cities are all collective public spaces with a few small stacked private spaces in which we live.
Cities are built by utopians but populated by dystopias. The difference lies in the society. Unlike less dense communities, cities offer little refuge or escape from public spaces into private ones. New York City’s apartments are small even at their most expansive price points and the amount of single family housing continues to drop even assuming that anyone could afford a home.
A social breakdown in a city is felt immediately. When I returned during the pandemic, I could feel the changes in the tension in the air that told me nowhere in the city was safe anymore.
The subway, at its best a means of connecting the city’s varied neighborhoods that is unrivaled in the country and perhaps the world (although Londoners and Parisians may disagree) is wonderful for rapidly navigating the city’s cultural circulatory system, but when a society is poisoned, that same system just as rapidly spreads the poison everywhere that it can reach.
The New York City subway is why Los Angeles and other cities long resisted rapid public transportation, not just because of the cost, but to keep the bad elements from spreading. While other cities can gate off the worst of the problem, retreat to the suburbs and hope that tolls and the cost of car ownership can keep roaming maniacs at bay, there is no such defense here.
Like a heroin shot to the veins, whatever is in the city hits its subways first. Drugs, violence, terror, pain and fear travel along the lines. They roam the byzantine interiors of stations left over from the convoluted merging of the city’s different systems, they live in them and kill in them. The subway is a metaphor for the city. And the city is very, very sick.
If you doubt that, take the A train or the F train. Just listen, look and watch your back.
I remember riding on the BART public transportation in San Francisco with my tall, 6’3″ son. We sat down and my son was in the seat behind me, he said “Move over” and he sat down next to me with his body turned facing the aisle Why? Four punks, talking smack, had just gotten on. As they came down the aisle my son looked them straight in the eye and said nothing. The message was conveyed.
That was my only experience using public transportation….and my last. I was so grateful he was with me. I cannot imagine the level of fear and anxiety subway patrons in NY must experience every time they ride.
The Adams administration (mayor included) should have to ride it daily for six weeks without accompanying security. Let them experience what soft on crime and no-bail policies reap.
I just read that Sliwa and the Guardian Angels are beefing up their volunteer patrols on the subways…let’s hope there is some much needed restoration of basic civility and safety.
In the interim, please trust your gut and be aware of your surroundings by foregoing the use of your ear buds and your Smartphone obsession. Crazies look for your vulnerabilities and use your inattentiveness to hurt you. It’s the same on the street; that’s why if walking I’m uncomfortable with someone walking right behind me and I will either stop and move to the side while they pass or cross the street.
What a living nightmare De Blasio and now Adams have made NY city.
I live in the DMV. I suspect we have the same problems in DC. But it rarely gets covered.
The New York City Subway system has become a prison yard. Solitary confinement is safer.
Both native and imported New Yorkers have become like jailhouse recidivists who renounce the freedom that lies beyond its boundaries. Gotham has crushed the individual spirit.
Well, we have TWO trains to nowhere here in California. That’s for the better, in my opinion. A train from scum-pit Oakland that transports the usual suspects across the state for free? No, thanks.
Really? I’ve never been on a train in my life and it’s not on my bucket list! I’ve never jumped out of a airplane either and that’s certainly not on my bucket list!
As an older cousin once said to me back when I was a young lad, “only two things fall out the sky: bird sh*t and damn fools.” My cousin was a US Army paratrooper……
I actually use the light rail here in San Jose regularly. I drink a lot so so I can’t drive most days.
It’s not so bad but it is infested with homeless derelicts scumbags.
Bulls-eye. Hits the nail on the head. In Democrat areas the population of low lifes has grown huge and is out of control, taking over public spaces like parks and public transit. Meanwhile police and security have been reduced.
Well, didn’t you get the memo? In our brave new world, the dregs of society have to be re-centered and have the maximum personal autonomy while decent peoples’ ability to travel and live free from threat is to be drastically curtailed.
Anyone who would set a woman on fire should get the Death Penalty without all those stupid years of Appeals then have them Cremated and their ashes scattered over Bidens Home
Shoved down Bidumb’s mouth until he chokes to death.
Cremation should be the way the death penalty is carried out.
Yeah, just fucking flame them. They don’t deserve any consideration.
“The last person to be burned at the stake in Europe was Cayetano Ripoll, a Spanish schoolmaster, in 1834.”
They still use the garrote in Spain and Portugal.
I read a book years ago about how NYC fixed this issue I think it was called Broken Windows where all minor infringements were prosecuted. I always used the subway whenever I worked in NYC but it was years ago now.
I also remember the massive difference in London subways after the enforced lockdown hysteria.
Broken Windows was done under Mayor Giuliani—-a Republican of course! Good times in NYC!
Look at the giant lips on that punk. If he stuck his head out of a car window while it was driving, they’d beat him to death. “Blubba blubba blubba!”
Talk about ugly.
I think those type of lips are designed to dissipate heat in hot climates
Similarly thin lips are meant to preserve heat in cold climates.
I got interested in that topic in junior high school, where I had a teacher with ultra thin lips 🙂
Very interesting, thanks for sharing. I grew up in warm climate but have very thin lips.
Nothing could get me into most of large cities. I’ve been sensing over the last several decades a narcissistic immorality in our culture that seems to thrive in denser populated places. Be it Disneyland or Denver.. Maybe it is our retreat from our Judeo/Christian foundations which John Adams would recognize immediately. Maybe the increase of unassimilated migrants who never have and never will understand America. Our culture has gotten cruder and ruder and the people reflect it more profoundly in urban settings. The fifties weren’t perfect, but I felt safer in crowds and particularly in our once great cities.
New Yorkers had a chance to avoid this decline with the election of Zelden. They chose Hochul. They get what they vote for good and hard. With new elections I have no doubt they will make the wrong decision again and New York will continue on the road to hell and total societal and economic collapse.
New York has had the same vote fraud as the nation at large. New York Stare and suburbs are conservative. The election cheating and the urban area with many immigrants and some extreme lefties create a communistic leadership machine that most of the people in New York City an d State abhor.
Just got back from two weeks in London. Their Underground is unsurpassed. Clean. People look out for one another. If only NYC could learn from them…
Bravo, Daniel! This article is a tour de force, horrifying but utterly true. It should be widely disseminated, and widely read.
Thank you so much
My family and I visited NYC in the summer of approx. 2005. It was a wonderful experience. We felt safe everywhere we went, no matter what time of the day or night. And everyone was very nice and helpful to us. We rode the subways, walked around Times Square, and thoroughly enjoyed our visit.
I’m glad we visited before it all fell apart.
That was an ideal time to be there
I’ve never been to New York. It’s a real shame what has happened to the subway system and the city in general. When I was in Europe a few years ago, there was not a single negative occurrence to deal with while riding subway trains. Everything and everyone were very friendly, and there was the added bonus of street entertainment after some rides. Everything was clean and orderly in their public transportation systems.
The state and city governments have truly failed the people of New York. Public safety should be a top priority, especially during these tumultuous times.
Germany is suffering from a plague of Muslim train stabbings
Actually, and this is not hyperbole because I always tell the truth, the New York subway system has been taken over by the new leftist Danish Viking Party that in the dead of night stealthily rowed their longboats into New York harbor., sunk them just off Battery Park, and, like the Vilings have throughout history done so well, began recruiting unemployed subway thugs to wreak havok among the unarmed transit passengers just trying to get safely to work and return home to their loved ones. If I may, I humbly suggest that no subway thug is equal to a threatened woman wielding a hatpin. Millions for hatpins and not one cent for Wilhelmina. Thank you.
Did you have your top hat soaked in lead? It’s not my “unbirthday” today, but I think that I’m going to get a spot of tea anyway ☺️
At least you’re having fun