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An attendant exerts all his strength to squeeze in as many passengers as possible into a car at the 28th Street Station in New York. The most prominent passenger feature is the contorting face of a Black man. He is surrounded by white riders, one of whom is trying his best to read the newspaper, a little girl, who stands with her legs akimbo, and a white woman, obscured by the window. The hectic scene muddles the identity of body parts, more akin to a game of Twister than a fantasy of public mobility across an urban landscape. Reduced to limbs and faces, the diverse passengers portrayed in Bernard Brussel-Smith's 1940 lithograph demonstrate its title: Subway Crush.1
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of International Federation for Theatre Research
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1 Bernard Brussel-Smith, Subway Crush, 1940, lithograph. Image: 275 x 375 mm. Sheet: 320 x 423 mm.
2 Brooks, Michael W., Subway City: Riding the Trains, Reading New York (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), p. 3Google Scholar.
3 Sarah Goodyear, ‘More Women Ride Mass Transit Than Men. Shouldn't Transit Agencies Be Catering to Them?’, Bloomberg, 30 January 2015, at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-30/more-women-ride-mass-transit-than-men-shouldn-t-transit-agencies-be-catering-to-them, accessed 15 January 2024.
4 ‘Birth of Subway Crush: Scenes of Frenzied Pushing at 145th-St. Terminal Fence Laid Low by Crowd Reserves Stop Mad Stampede’, New York Tribune, 28 October 1904, p. 1.
5 For an excellent analysis of early twentieth-century subway songs see Stalter-Pace, Sunny, ‘The Subway Crush: Making Contact in New York City Subway Songs, 1904–1915’, Journal of American Culture, 34, 4 (December 2011), pp. 321–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Treadwell, Sophie, Machinal (London: Royal National Theatre: Nick Hern Books, 1993), p. 6Google Scholar.
7 Minyvonne Burke and Alicia Victoria Lozano, ‘Police Say Riders Didn't Help Woman Raped on Train. Does the “Bystander Effect” Explain Why?’, NBC News, 20 October 2021.
8 Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library, ‘Jane Hamilton Surrounded by Unidentified Actors in Subway Car Window in the Stage Production Subway’, New York Public Library Digital Collections, at https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/0a2a3cb0-66c5-0132-736d-58d385a7bbd0, accessed 27 December 2023.
9 See Tonnelat, Stéphane and Kornblum, William, International Express: New Yorkers on the 7 Train (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brooks, Subway City; Stalter-Pace, Sunny, Underground Movements: Modern Culture on the New York City Subway (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013)Google Scholar; Solis, Julia, New York Underground: The Anatomy of a City (New York: Routledge, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 MTA, ‘Subway and Bus Ridership for 2020’, at https://new.mta.info/agency/new-york-city-transit/subway-bus-ridership-2020, accessed 12 April 2022.
11 Miller, D. Lee, The Long Haul (New Play Exchange, 2020), p. 2Google Scholar.
12 Rattlestick Theater, ‘Times Square’, MTA Radio Plays, n.d., at https://www.rattlestick.org/mta-radio-plays.
13 MTA, ‘Subway and Bus Ridership for 2020’.
14 Brock, Henry Irving and Golinkin, Joseph Webster, New York Is Like This (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1929), p. 76Google Scholar.
15 Christina Goldbaum, ‘Miss the N.Y.C. Subway? These Radio Plays Bring It Back to Life’, The New York Times, 24 December 2020, sec. C, p. 2.
16 Ibid.
17 Ana Ley, ‘Subway Ridership Rises, But Risk-Adverse Women Are Reluctant to Return’, The New York Times, 13 February 2023, p. A15.