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I was born in Nassau county in the 70's. We moved south to the DC area right before I started school, but I spent lots of time there visiting my grandparents every summer.
So, from age 3 to 11, I had many memorable trips into the city.
The subway cars always fascinated me. Because I had always seen them covered in graffitti, and my family never really talked about it, I was probably pretty old before I really grasped what had been done to them- I guess I just thought that was how subway cars looked. I remember passing over some subway stockyard on the LIRR and seeing all those graf-covered trains lined up. It was somehow both beautiful and menacing.
I remember going into the city with my grandma when I was six or seven, and transferring from the LIRR to the subway. Although I looked forward to going inside those graf-covered trains, I was dissappointed to discover that there were no bathrooms on them. I also didn't care for the tags on the inside-like an old curmudgeon at a modern art museum, I thought it just looked like a bunch of scribbles. Of course, by then, I understood that "big kids" had done all of this, although I doubt I understood it to be a criminal act.
I understand why people like the clean trains better, but it definitely saddened me as a teenager when I went to the city and realized they were eliminating those big old burners. I wasn't into graf or anything, but rather, it was like a piece of my childhood was gone.
At least we still had the csx, though...
Last edited by Hieronymus Bosch; 01-14-2012 at 02:03 AM..
I've been a resident of New York since 2007. Thank God I missed all that.
According to all the people I know that were in NYC in the 80s, there was an incredible flavor in the city, graffs everywhere, yeah New York was dangerous and grimy as hell but at least it had an identity. I would pay to be there in that era.
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