The Nickel's Last Ride

Twice a day, six days a week, some 3,250.000 New Yorkers descend into the maelstrom of the subways with the haunted resignation of lemmings, there to die the small death of the rush hour. Their resurrection is recurrent, rapid and rumpled. The subway rider issues forth from a car door like breakfast food shot from guns--with the important difference that he is thereby shrunken rather than puffed.

Entombment in the subways bears some resemblance, anthropologically, to that of Ben Jonson, who was buried in Westminster Abbey standing up, although with considerable ceremony and no shoving. In New York, the ritual of subway burial is casual, involving only the dropping of a nickel into a turnstile. Rarely is the loved one accompanied to the entrance--and, once on the platform, he is on his own.

Bullying. Once in the car, the average New Yorker stands on roughly 1.4 square feet of floor space or on somebody else's feet. The subway rider is a sullen example of the incredible compressibility of the human frame. There are seats in all cars but it is the fixed belief of most travelers that these are occupied by paid agents who do nothing but ride perpetually over the city-owned system's 237 miles.

In common with the dead, the subway rider is beyond frustration. Year in & year out, winter & summer, he is bullied, bustled and beaten by his fellows seeking the same Nirvana--a skyscraper in Manhattan in the morning, an apartment in Brooklyn, The Bronx or Queens at night. To this end he suffers his hat to be mashed, his glasses to be knocked off, his unread newspaper to be shredded, and his nose to be assailed by smells more pungent than those in an Arabian casbah. He endures dank tunnels and windswept platforms in winter, choking dust and stifling heat in summer, and the muscular importunities of station guards in all seasons.

Nevertheless, since the day they were opened in 1904, the subways have been cheap. They offered the longest uninterrupted ride-in the world (if anyone could stand it) for a nickel--22.65 rniles from the remote reaches of The Bronx to even remoter reaches of Brooklyn.

Needling. In years past the nickel fare had no louder defender than New York's mayors and loud Mike Quill, boss of the C.I.O. Transport Workers. But in recent months Mike's men have hit up New York's Mayor Bill O'Dwyer for a 30-c--an-hour raise. Moreover, O'Dwyer was hagridden with a $52 million transit operating deficit.

Last week, after much muttering, Bill O'Dwyer went on the air. In his rich policeman's brogue, he broadcast the bad news: after June 30 New Yorkers would have to pay a dime to ride their dirty old subways.

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