Loneliness, melancholy and tedium in 10 photographs of the NY Metro

Wagons and sidewalks were filled with tramps, drunkards, drug traffickers, prostitutes, assailants and members of dangerous gangs.

The elevated line of the new York Metro was the first to open. This happened in 1885. It was up to 1904 that the underground tracks began to house thousands of passengers and move them from the Bronx to Manhattan, from Rockefeller Center to the City Hall, from different neighborhoods of Brooklyn to the legendary Coney Island. Little by Little, the Metro was filled with people from different racial and economic backgrounds, to form a fauna that exhibited the misery and decay of the city.

In the 1970, the city faced a very high crime wave, which saw in the subway a golden opportunity for the assailants and gangs to make their own under the powerless gaze of authority. Wagons and sidewalks were filled with tramps, drunkards, drug traffickers, prostitutes, assailants and members of dangerous gangs that emerged in the majority of the Bronx. This wave of criminality and sinister exposure of the spoils of the city, made in the subway breathing a huge existential emptiness.

The graffiti found in the wagons, Windows and columns the ideal surfaces to paint their names, write political slogans and create multicolored figures that gave a touch of decay, dirt and discredit to this great metal worm that It tore the bowels of one of the largest cities in the United States. The people on board traveled with all kinds of feelings inside, but above all with a great loneliness and hopelessness gnawing his soul.

While outside the streets seethed of business, tourism and artistic activity between thousands of cars and hundreds of skyscrapers, in the subway was lived a tedium and a monotony among the clerks who had to face again one more day of work. The combination of their outfits and the sordid atmosphere of the underground, which referreded a sort of sour urban jungle, were the counterpart of the city's delinquency and the prosperity it managed to achieve in a gradual way after a strong economic downturn.

Low life was one of the most referred terms at that time in the poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods of Manhattan and the surrounding areas. He was referring to the decadence that existed in the poorest neighborhoods, in the streets where drugs were sold and where prostitutes offered themselves to the highest bidder among garbage cans. In the subway there was also that feeling of permanent anguish: the graffiti were able to tell stories of crime and crime, blood and junkies that slept under the shelter of the gases that emerged from the tunnels in the company of rats. In the subway also lived that feeling of permanent anguish: the graffiti were able to tell stories of crimes and delinquency, of blood and junkies that slept under the protection of the gases that emerged of the tunnels in company of the rats.

New York is one of the cities with the most nationalities gathered in the same territory; People from all continents inhabit that piece of Earth today luminous, but some dark and dangerous time. His subway system is a witness to the multitude of races and beliefs that parade through the Big Apple and that feed it of stories and great anecdotes. But everyone shared in the 70 that feeling of emptiness, fatigue and melancholy that these images capture. Its sepia tone and somewhat neglected angle, almost clandestine, bring this idea, coupled with the darkness that envelops each one of them. The Metro with definite destination but with wandering souls inside was an absolute contradiction.

In the decade of 1970, in the underground and in the slums the survival was the most common currency, far from the opulence of the neighborhoods of the most affluent classes, where everything was artificial and ostentatious. You had to get into your subway, travel in it, breathe your pestilence, to observe its people in combination with street art to understand the bohemian disease of a city that has always fascinated both its inhabitants and those who visit it at least once in life.

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