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You Must Take the A Train

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BBC Radio 4 Extra - You Must Take the A Train

Author Adam Gopnik rides New York's longest subway train which is famous for its song.

Adam Gopnik rides New York's longest subway train, from Manhattan to the sea, famous in song and imagination. From 2012.

New Yorker columnist and author Adam Gopnik confesses to 'a perverse love' of his city's subway system. 

In particular, he likes the two hour run of the A train from the tip of Manhattan to the Atlantic Ocean in the outer borough of Queens.

Along the way he encounters vendors, preachers, rappers, beggars and the homeless passengers who live in the subway cars and in the tunnels.

As a jazz lover, he celebrates Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn's song as an anthem of black migration. which imitates the sound of the train and insists:

"You must take the A train 
To go to Sugar Hill way up in Harlem."

In 1932, punters queued to take the first A train ride as it went express along the west side of the city. It opened up suburbs, with a fast commute for workers in the Garment District, Times Square and in the offices and restaurants of Midtown. It also linked the dynamic established community of Harlem with the newer black neighbourhoods in Brooklyn.

Gopnik admits to enjoying the graffiti that spread across the subway cars in the 1970s and 80s, but acknowledges that this was a sign of how New York had lost control. Since most New Yorkers don't own a car and the subway is the artery of a city, that dysfunctional slide was disastrous.

It's only in the last 15 years that the system has become safe and comparatively pleasant again. For a reporter like Gopnik, it's a perfect way to indulge in people watching and the best subway line to get a real sense of the city. 

However, depending on your mood, it can either be enervating or profoundly depressing, because it still reveals the seedy, aggressive, desperate and heart-breaking side of New York.

Producer: Judith Kampfner

A Corporation For Independent Media production for BBC Radio 4, first broadcast in June 2012.

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