The Station Nobody Rides Through

The first line of the subway opened under lower Manhattan in nineteen oh four, and it still runs today on almost the same tracks, day and night, every day of the year, one of the very few systems anywhere that never fully closes. Polly followed a train down through a grate and along the tunnel toward its original starting point.

That starting point was built to impress. Curved skylights let daylight down through glass set into the sidewalk above, and the ceiling arched overhead in a pattern of vaulted tile more often seen in a church than underground. Brass fixtures and colored glass finished a station meant to convince a nervous public that traveling underground could still feel like something worth doing.

The trouble was the curve itself. The platform bends sharply to turn the train back the other way, and it was built to match trains barely half the length of the ones that came later. When longer cars arrived with doors set along their centers as well as their ends, opening those center doors on such a tight bend became dangerous, and the station closed to the public at the end of nineteen forty-five.

It was never torn out. The tile and the glass and the curved brass lamps are all still down there in the dark, passed by every single train on that line without a single passenger ever stepping onto the platform. Polly perched on an old brass rail as one more train rattled through, lit for a few seconds and then gone.