From El to Hell: On Stage in the Urban Underworld

Images of the New York subway and its precursors, the Elevated train and the horse-car, hold a special place in American culture. While the descent into the subway station and the ride along endless miles of subterranean tracks are almost inevitably figured as a journey to the Underworld, the whole affair is an inescapably social event. Passengers play a complex game of visual hide-and-seek with each other as they try to scrutinize the people around them without being caught in the act. In this essay I explore the visual and verbal representation of New York’s otherworldly transit system in terms of what may be its most striking motifs—theatricality and spectatorship. My examples are taken from poetry and prose, painting and photography, including works by Stephen Crane, Hart Crane, Charles Reznikoff, Allen Ginsberg, Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Blackburn, George Tooker, Edward Hopper, Everett Shinn, Thomas Hart Benton, John Sloan, Leroi Jones, and Ralph Ellison. I conclude with a more sustained look at the haunting subway photographs taken secretly by Walker Evans from 1938-1941. In Evans’s photos, the visual short circuit that characterizes subway spectatorship (look but don’t get looked at) finds its most striking expression.