Pulling into Grand Central Terminal this morning on a Metro North train from Westchester, I remembered that when I first moved here Grand Central was my main station. I took the 4, 5 from 86th street to Grand Central every day to my consulting job. It felt so cool and adult to work in a historic landmark. Then I got fired and moved to Brooklyn.
In New York, when you’re at a party and you have nothing to talk about and you’ve already exhausted talk of real estate, you talk about the subway. What do you take? What’s not running right now, like right now? Is it Cuomo or de Blasio’s fault that the trains suck so much? But I’ve never asked if other people feel like they have a main station.
Like I said, at first mine was Grand Central. Then it became Union Square and the Metropolitan/Lorimer L, G stop. Now, so much of my life depends on the 34th Street Herald Square station. It’s where I go to work. It’s where I go to do improv. Atlantic Barclays to 34th Street Herald Square. I do it almost every day.
Here’s the thing, Herald Square kind of sucks. I recently had a friend come and meet me for lunch. She asked if there was a good place to go. Uh, you know what? No, not really. If a tourist were coming to New York, no one would tell them, “You know where you have to go? Herald Square! It’s the midpoint between Madison Square Garden the Empire State Building. There are chain food restaurants and a bunch of overpriced pubs for Rangers fans!”
It’s said that familiarity breeds contempt but I think that familiarity with the mundane breeds fondness. No one is supposed to like a subway station, especially an ugly one. The F, M, D, B platform is dirty and drips disgusting water when it rains and I’d put its rat population up against any other platform in the city. The N, Q, R, W platform, clean only in relation to its neighbor, has that weird noise machine where you wave your hand in front of it and it makes chime noises. It’s not particularly pleasant and it’s annoying as hell when you’re not the one doing it.
Even so Herald Square is my station. I like that you can exit through the JC Penny into the Manhattan Mall. I like that when I’m on the B or the D it goes express from 4th street to 34th street for no discernible reason. What was once an annoying, downright arbitrary layout of stairs and escalators is now a modern convenience just because I know how to navigate it.
As New Yorkers, we put up with a lot of inconvenience, then we adapt to it and have a pseudo Stockholm Syndrome relationship to it where we love something because we’ve learned to put up with it. Then, eventually, the thing we hated gets torn down or redesigned and we complain about how the city’s changed.
Given the way the MTA’s been run lately, 34th Street Herald Square will be a piece of crap for the foreseeable future. My piece of crap.
