Falling in Love With the T

It's not every day one falls in love. I, however, have fallen. She's not too comely; in fact, she's large, slow and her perfume recalls the aroma of men's bathrooms and elephant cages. Alas, love is blind. I've fallen for Boston's T, which seems more perfect for each of its imperfections.

Built in 1897, the T was the first subway in North America. Then, it was a sign of Boston's increasing industrialization and was praised for its efficiency. No longer is it the most efficient subway, though--Washington and New York have bested it. But, by contrast to its younger siblings, the T has, and builds, character. Today the T stands as a quasi-romantic critique of the soulless efficiency of its contemporaries.

No other subway boasts such a pleasing cacophony of dissonant sights, sounds and people. Each line, for instance, is unique and uniquely suited to the neighborhoods it connects. The relative cleanliness of the Red Line is well-suited for the ever-vigilant vanity of Harvard and MIT, as the grimy intimacy of Green Line cars fits the downtown neighborhoods they visit.

Each station, too, is an island entire of itself. The maritime frescoes of Aquarium, the charming, chiming engineering at Kendall, the platform-in-the-clouds at Charles/MGH--all make the T a bubbling congress of individuals.

Similarly, an eclectic mix of cheery students and weary proletarians converge. They brush against one another in dank corridors, share impatient waits for lazy trains and lock in forced, anonymous embrace on packed cars.

All to a comically odd soundtrack, courtesy of a colorful bouquet of musicians. A morose punk rocker in painfully tight leather, whose music marries Alice Cooper to Tracy Chapman, splits Government Center with the occasional trio of starving violinists from the New England Conservatory. The would-be blues guitarist battles an aging Rastafarian below Harvard Square. All create a soothing din amidst the T's unkind acoustics.

Not to be forgotten, the warm accent of conductors, whose soothing "Hahvahd Squares" and "Pahk Streets" fill those cars not equipped with eerily fake computerized voices.

But the T's virtues are best seen in relief to its vicious peers. New York's subway, at least, is similarly musical. The musicians inside the subway itself are rare--and rarely any good--but more important is the potential for a New York subway ride to become a veritable sing-along. There, one can actually "Take the A Train," and it's great fun to sing the "Welcome Back Kotter" theme song while entering Brooklyn. The trouble, of course, is the bevy of thugs (meaner than Vinny Barbarino) and wayward youth who scare timid passengers, especially tourists, into silent submission. Nevertheless, the subway's filth fairly represents the less attractive features of city life. If Jefferson and Hamilton had had to ride the New York subway to work every day, we might all be living on the farm.

And then there's Washington's Metro, a disgustingly clean and predictable subway. There, faux-Roman arches make every station into a cavernous Pantheon. Which would be fine, had the Romans built with concrete, but they knew better. Washington's Metro is the Mather House of subways--simultaneously large, impressive, cold and ugly. All the same, it has redeeming features--like the Sonny Rollins look- and sound-alike who plays atop Farragut North or the longest escalator outside of Russia at Wheaton. But these amenities do little to compensate for its reigning hobgoblin, a gray-grim consistency.

As Burke intimated: to make us love our subway, our subway must be lovely; not merely awesome, like DC's vaulted ceilings, nor intimidating, like the band of merry men on New York's trains. Perhaps the T's age is gone; maybe that of the D C Metro has succeeded. But, fortunately, the T is safely encased below Boston, and its glory will not fade anytime soon--at least, not so long as every small platoon of liberty, the unique stations, musicians and the rest, remain. Boston had the best subway at the beginning of the 20th century, and the same is true at the beginning of the 21st.

Hugh P. Liebert '01 is a social studies concentrator in Eliot house. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.