Could I have your attention for a moment, please? [neuralyzes the crowd] Thank you for participating in our drill. Had this been an actual emergency, y'all would have been *eaten*. 'Cause you don't listen! You're ignorant! That's the problem with y'all New Yorkers, you're hardheaded. "Oh, we've seen it all." I come in, I ask you nicely... how's a man gonna come busting through the back of a subway - then the worm comes in, and it's, "Oh, another 600 foot worm. Save us, Mr. Black Man!" You all...[neuralyzes the crowd again] The City of New York would like to thank you for participating in our drill. Hopefully you enjoyed our smaller, more energy-efficient subway cars. Watch your step, you will have a nice evening.

Agent J in Men in Black II

In October 27, 1904, New York City gave birth to a subway, and the subway gave a multitude of gifts in return. The most practical were the powers of speed and sprawl just 15 minutes from City Hall to Harlem; just 40 years from the bottom of Brooklyn to the top of the Bronx, with stations scattered like seedcorn in between. Wherever New Yorkers took the subway, the city rode along. New Yorkers and tourists alike have been facinated, amused, amazed, repelled and bewildered by the world-within-a-world that lies beneath the city.

In the process, the subway gave us much more than a way to work and back home. It gave us an object of pride and fascination, fear and loathing. It gave us a permanent topic of conversation and a perfect excuse for being late. It gave poets a new muse and moviemakers a new set. It gave warmth to the cold, a bed to the weary and a captive audience to anyone with a cheap guitar.

But it also gave another gift, much less appreciated and more important, one that changed the city fundamentally and forever: the gift of proximity. In other words, the subway made us sit together. And stand together. And, of course, wait and sweat and swear together. If you ever road the subway, you are probably longing to live in a place - meaning basically any other place in the country - where most people go places inside the upholstered cocoons of their cars, catching glimpses of their fellow citizens through safety glass at 70 miles an hour.

Yet bitter as it may be, proximity has powerful medicinal qualities. It might not perform miracles. It might not make New Yorkers talk or smile more or even be particularly more personable, but inside hundreds of train cars coursing at any minute above and below the streets, it is nonetheless weaving sturdy threads through the fabric of the city.

Every day, subway riders find themselves inches from people with whom they would not willingly choose to share a long city block. But like schoolchildren in detention, riders form a kind of unspoken bond while forced into each others' company - call it the kinship of the mildly oppressed. The busboy and the bond broker, sitting haunch to haunch, are sitting there for the same reason: The train they are riding is generally the fastest and most efficient way to get where they are going. If it succeeds in this regard or even if it fails them (in fact, especially if it fails), the two share something - surely the only thing they will ever share - until the doors open and they step out.

Statistics show that six out of every 10 people traveling toward the center of Manhattan on an average workday morning traveled there inside a subway car. This is a level of enforced neighborhood not found anywhere else in America, even in Chicago with its El or Boston with its T. And it has done a great deal to make New York - always an odd appendage to the rest of the nation - a true American anomaly, more tolerant and cohesive than a city its size ever had a right to be.

In the first year of the subway's operations, there were firsts of many things now considered inseparable from life in New York City. There were the first complaints about the heat, about the quality of the air, about germs, about noise and about delays (on the first full day of operation, express service failed twice because of electrical problems). There were also the first complaints about crowding, perverts and lousy announcements. (An editorial in the Times put it this way: "If any one form of words is better calculated than another to implant a homicidal impulse in the breast of the average man, it is the formula `Step Lively!' which has gained a new vogue through its employment by the trainmen of the Subway system.")

In the first year, the system was hobbled by the first transit strike and the first power failure. Trains were delayed for the first time by a water-main break, a fire, a stray dog. The first subway worker was killed by a train. The first passenger was crushed to death between the train and the platform. The first person was struck and killed by a speeding train (an unfortunate resident of the Bronx named Leidschnudel Dreispul). The first fatal crash of two subway trains also occurred (it was at the 23rd Street station; William H. Curran, a 17year-old law clerk, died afterward).

The first movie was made in the subway (a documentary for August Belmont, the system's chief financier) and the first play was written about the subway (the plot concerned a scheme in which unsatisfied husbands killed their wives by throwing them onto the tracks).

The first bar named for the subway was in operation (the Subway Tavern at Bleecker and Broome). New Yorkers took the subway for the first time to a ball game (the New York Highlanders, later to become the Yankees, beat the Washington Senators, 5 to 3, at American League Park in Washington Heights on April 22, 1905). New Yorkers also took their first trip by subway to the first New Year's celebration in Times Square (before 1904, the biggest crowds usually gathered near Trinity Church). Finally, the first known proposal of marriage in the subway was made and accepted. (William Darbeau, firefighter, popped the question to Miss Helen Dodd, newsgirl, at Bleecker Street. She said she had to check with her mother first.)

A funny thing happens when you lock millions of people together underground in oblong metal rooms for a certain period of time. It creates a place that is much more than the sum of its parts. In fact, it generates a society unto itself, with its own citizenry, government, flora and fauna, customs, myths, taboos, tragedies and secret histories.

Tourists and occasional visitors have always described it that way, as a strange and slightly perilous place they explored while in New York City. But even veteran riders regard it as essentially foreign territory. They wonder why things work the way they do in the subway. They talk of the bizarre ways people behave there. They tell of the guy they saw there with the python draped around his neck. (Someone they tell will have seen him, too.) They tell horror stories and funny stories and sob stories that are better because they originated there. Why is it that a bad saxophone player sounds a little more talented playing on a crowded platform? Why is it that the Chinese violinist heard at Times Square playing "Jingle Bells" got more laughs there than he would have on the street above? It is because the subway, while inseparable from the city, is also a world apart from it.

In other cities, people go to work alone, with their thoughts and their car radios. For most, it is the only private time of the day. The subway serves the same purpose, except that New Yorkers must seek their privacy in the most public place imaginable-along with a million others seeking the same thing.

If a New Yorker averages half an hour on the subway every day over the course of his or her adult life, say 50 years, this adds up to slightly more than a year spent in the subway. It adds up, in other words, to a whole lot of life being lived down there. And it helps explain why the subway has played so many roles in the life of its city over the last century. Besides being the people's limousine, it has been, by turns, a lunchroom, a library, a dormitory, a chapel, a concert hall, a bazaar, a Bowery mission and a boudoir. It has served as a deathbed and, many times, a maternity ward for babies who could not wait until the next stop. It has been the city's biggest singles scene and its biggest station wagon. Sometimes, late on weekend nights, it smells like a saloon. Early in the 21st century, it is now officially impossible to imagine this city without it.

New Yorkers usually refer to each line by the designator and the word train, i.e. the "A train", which can be used to refer to both a single train, "I'm on an A train", or the route, "take the A train." New Yorkers may often shorten the expression to simply the line's designation. For example: "Take the A to the 1" would mean to "Take the A train and transfer to the 1 train." The lines are not referred to by color (e.g., Blue line or Green line), although the colors are often named through their groups ("Take the A-C-E" or "4-5-6", etc).

On July 22, 2005, in response to bombings in London, United Kingdom, the New York City Police Department introduced a new policy of randomly searching passengers' bags as they approached turnstiles. The NYPD claimed that no form of racial profiling would be conducted when these searches actually took place. This has caused the NYPD to come under fire because these searches were deemed ineffectual if racial profiling was not used. "This NYPD bag search policy is unprecedented, unlawful and ineffective," said Donna Lieberman, Executive Director of the NYCLU. "It is essential that police be aggressive in maintaining security in public transportation. But our very real concerns about terrorism do not justify the NYPD subjecting millions of innocent people to suspicionless searches in a way that does not identify any person seeking to engage in terrorist activity and is unlikely to have any meaningful deterrent effect on terrorist activity."

Randy Kennedy. . St Martin's Griffin, New York. 2004.

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