Better known as the PATH, the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad began shuttling passengers through its cast iron tunnels between Manhattan and points in New Jersey in 1908. My travels have been constrained in the last couple of months due to pregnancy. I haven’t been on a plane since October and my last trip out of the country was a 12 hour jaunt to Montreal in September. I’ve even turned down trips to Paris! Our radius of wanderlust has been increasingly contained within slowly

Much of NYC’s life takes place underground. Last Tuesday was a holiday for my place of work, and I used the morning to get some errands for some projects done. On the subway, sometimes you are just traveling. This is what most commuters do, enter a sort of stasis between work and home. You might people watch, which is certainly an urban pastime. There are the colorful, the rude, the homeless, the people asking for money. It’s not as “heads down, me against the world” as some

New York City’s subway opened in 1904. During an era of competing private lines that radiated from the heart of Manhattan into the boroughs, 468 stations were built through the completion of the Independent Subway in 1932. Time is hard on all of us, especially when you have to put up with steel dust, dropped food, people leaning on tiles, rainstorms dumping water into stations, and graffiti. Subway stations require renovation, and rolling around New York, you can tell what st

On the top of my list of cool things to do in New York City: visit City Hall Station, the abandoned star of the New York city subway system. Opened in 1904, the one way loop station’s design and close proximity to the Brooklyn Bridge station doomed it for obsolescence from the beginning. It was closed in December, 1945. Today, it’s used to turn around downtown 6 trains and deposit them back on the uptown bound local track. City Hall Station. RL Fifield photo, 2010. You can to

Transit Tuesday is moving on in on Museum Monday. London Transport Museum. Old Metropolitan Railway Car. Photo: RL Fifield 2010. If I didn’t live in New York City, I would live in London. It feels like home. And for fans of transit, the London Transport Museum is an excellent time. In the city that invented modern urban transit, a plethora of equipment, signage, photos, and groovy wax mannequins in the old flower market building in Covent Garden just has to be good. In the su

Nothing underlines the fact that Sesame Street is a New York product like this 1974 clip “Subway.” It’s a bit discordant and urban, gritty and Muppety, all at the same time. Click here to watch Subway on YouTube. Photo: Muppet Wiki. #ChildrensTelevisionWorkshop #SesameStreet #transit #subway #NewYorkCity #Muppets

Transit and Museums? Two of my loves rolled up into one. Visitors to New York want to see the Empire State Building, Times Square, and the Statue of Liberty. I try to coax them off the beaten path. New York Transit Museum, platform level. RL Fifield, 2010. The New York Transit Museum is as much a social history museum as it is one of technology. The creation of public transportation was a catylyst for growth – without it, the city jams up. It also gave people the opportunity

Group listening to Bob Diamond of BHRA in the tunnel under Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn. RL Fifield, 2010. Until December 2010, at the intersection by the Trader Joes on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, you might find a few traffic cones surrounding a popped manhole cover. Dozens of people queued on the nearby sidewalk. Between green lights, a few people would cross the street to the area in the middle of the intersection, and one by one, slip below the asphalt on a household ladder

Take the A Train. Vintage Ride, NYC Subway, December 201 On Sundays in December, with a little luck and timing, you can catch classic New York City Subway R1/9 cars from the 1930s. It’s quite a party on the train, with railfans, musicians, and gawkers all piling on to remember transit’s roots. So climb aboard, and take a rattan covered bench, watch the heavy doors slide closed and the ceiling fans spin ’round. You can also roam the train as it rolls between stations: it’s gre