Subway City: Riding the Trains, Reading New York - Hardcover

Brooks, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0813523966 ISBN 13: 9780813523965

Publisher: Rutgers University Press, 1997

Synopsis

None of the world's great cities is as closely identified with its subway as New York. Its trains provide much more than just rapid transit. They give New Yorkers a powerful symbol of their metropolis, one that they use to express both their hopes and their fears for the urban future.

Subway City explores New York's transit system as both fact and metaphor. Brooks traces the development of the subway from its inception as the newest and most efficient public transportation system to its decline as an overcrowded and dangerous part of city life. The crowded cars gave Harold Lloyd material for comedy, fueled William Randolph Hearst's crusade against the Traction Trust, and convinced Lewis Mumford that the subway was a futile effort to solve the city's problems. Brooks explores films which have dramatized the dangers lurking below ground, and examines the infamous Bernhard Goetz shooting that made the subway a symbol of urban decay. More hopefully, he describes the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's station improvements and ambitious programs for Music Underground, Poetry in Transit, and Arts-in-Transit, as keys to the city's renewal.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Brooks, a professor of English at West Chester University, has published a book on John Ruskin and Victorian Architecture (Rutgers University Press).

Reviews

Throughout this century, the New York City subway has represented both the successes and failure of the modern city. Brooks (John Ruskin and Victorian Architecture, LJ 4/15/87) has written an eminently readable history of the New York City subway system and its impact on residents, politicians, and, in particular, artists and authors, from the earliest subway proposals and elevated railways in the 1860s through the depression and crime of the 1970s and 1980s. The comic films of Harold Lloyd, the political machinations of William Randolph Hearst, the paintings of Reginald Marsh, and the writings of James Baldwin have all reflected the influence of the subway. Brooks illustrates his work with many reproductions of newspaper cartoons, etchings, and woodcuts, and it contains extensive notes. This book will find an audience, both general and scholarly, among readers of history and popular culture.?Linda M. Kaufmann, Freel Lib., North Adams State Coll., Mass.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0813523966
• ISBN 13: 9780813523965
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 252