Subway Underworlds: 1

The subways of New York City display it’s rich past, now mired by constant changes and transformations to its analogous landscape. The streets of New York City are riddled with old, new spaces: buildings built right atop the remains of past buildings, streets with old and new trash stamped forever into the cement, and public parks that also serve as mass burial grounds to old citizens of New York who died in bouts with rampant disease. The subways of New York, as documented by Jonathan Lethem in Speak Hoyt-Schermerhorn, share the same forgotten history:

The Hoyt-Shermerhorn station stood at the border of the vibrant mercantile disarray of Fulton Street—once the borough’s poshest shopping and theater boulevard. […] The station itself gave testimony to the lost commercial greatness of the area. (73)

Lethem looks past the run-down station of the present, taking in its rich history accompanied by its inglorious fall to crime. The Hoyt-Schermerhorn station, although run down now, will forever hold its status of grandeur through memory. As long as people like Lethem are still alive, nothing will be able to “displace [the] memory’s primacy or fade its color” (79).