City - Wednesday, September 10, 2008 9:31 - 2 Comments

A New York Fairy Tale: Subways That Are Convenient But Do Not Exist

I recently moved to Prospect Heights, close to the Brooklyn Museum. Though the neighborhood is beautiful, I am still trying to get used to how the subway rolls around lower Brooklyn.

To get to anywhere in Manhattan, I usually take the 2 and the 3 to Atlantic Ave where most of the major subways of Manhattan converge, and just switch from there. That’s the simple part. It gets a little trickier if I want to go to the upper part of Brooklyn, like to Williamsburg or Greenpoint (Why would I ever visit Greenpoint, you ask? Because they have delicious pyrogies!) For some reason, however, it never occurred to the city government to install a train that runs from lower Brooklyn, east of Prospect Park, to upper Brooklyn.

And how about a subway that travels from Brooklyn to Queens? It’s ridiculous that in order for Brooklynites to get to Queens, they have to hike into Manhattan and sit through a good lower half of it before finally curving into a borough that lies directly above where they began. (Why would I ever visit Queens, you say? Because Flushing has the most delicious authentic Sichuan restaurant – spice-lovers from the other boroughs shouldn’t hesitate making the pilgrimmage for it.)

Anyway, it was rather timely that I caught this short piece in the Times by Alice Mattison where she laments the lack of convenient trains around the area. It’s like she knew I just moved! One of my favorite parts referred to an imaginary train to Wiliamsburg.

“Jeff Lin, a Denver sociology professor who used to live in Prospect Heights (sharing an apartment with one of my sons), would have liked to see a line that went from Prospect Heights to Williamsburg when he was dating a woman who lived near the L. “It could be called the Hipster Express or the Square Glasses line,” he suggests.”

Maybe we will soon have the Second Avenue subway line, which was profiled by the New York Magazine under the epithet “The Line that Time Forgot.” But I probably shouldn’t hold my breath.

Photo by Dene Chen