A Report From Below: Views From The L Train
A poetic investigation into New York’s most underground scene.
By Ali Royals
Photography by Eleanor Kaestner
Published
The Subway Surf Report is a monthly column that investigates New York’s most underground scene. Each installment captures subterranean snapshots of humanity at its realest and most randomized.
What is probably a peanut but looks like a human tooth rolls past the exposed bone of my ankle and into the center of my L Train car. We’re rattling around underground, somewhere between Gramercy and Grand Street.
If the Seven Wonders of the World are looking to add an eighth to their illustrious ranks, the New York Subway System makes a convincing case. There’s a bald guy with a birthmark in the shape of the Tesla logo imprinted on his skull. A girl in light–up sketchers folds a paper fortune teller, furling and unfurling the future of our universe between her tiny fingers. The hottest man you’ve ever seen is sporting a graphic t-shirt featuring a sloth and the slogan, “Not fast. Not furious.”
In the stations of the subway, no one talks about the weather. You take to the underground to spill your guts, to teleport from one street corner of the city to another, to warp the fabric of time and space for a mere two dollars and seventy-five cents.