In November 2023, the New York Times published an article entitled “Does Anyone Know How to Behave on the Subway Anymore?”. Ana Ley’s piece touched on the unspoken rules of etiquette on the New York City subway and how riders have lost these in a post-pandemic world. In response to this, the city’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) put up signs that “feature cartoon drawings emphasizing good behavior.” Those who have lived in cities with an underground transit system will already have some sense of these rules: no loud music, give up your seats to those who need them, let people off before you get on. But where do these ideas of “correct” behavior on public transport come from?
By looking at an early example of the Subway Sun, a piece of what I term “subway reading,” I argue that these ideas were present from the very beginning of metropolitan transit in New York. Much like the MTA’s new campaign, the Sun—a bulletin commissioned by the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT) that appeared on the New York subway during the first few decades of the twentieth century—featured editions on the need for “correct” behavior. The key question here, which I hope to answer, is why this “need” exists in the first place. Ley’s article goes some way to answering this when she cites that “recent arrivals have not assimilated as easily as prior waves of people because there have been fewer New Yorkers to model their behavior after.” The quotation invokes the language of crisis and assimilation, which usually manifests when there is a need to control something that poses a risk to the dominant economic system. Often employed as a rhetorical device to shape social reproduction, this language requires groups—usually historically oppressed—to absorb themselves into prevailing cultural norms. Relying on the reproduction of class, race, and gender divisions, to name a few, this creates an inevitable power imbalance. In the most extreme cases, this imbalance can lead to the violent policing of behavior, which, as a method of “crisis” control, ensures there are no interruptions to capitalist modes of production and the division of labor.