Like the Power Broker, but for subways

October 20, 2024 3:37 PM

The Power Broker is ostensibly about Robert Moses but it's also about NYC and the Port Authority. There are a LOT of books about the MTA but are there any that give a good, sweeping history AND are full of trivia and minutiae?

For better or for worse, the NYC Subway never had a Moses-like figure (AFAIK). Has it had as good a book written about it as the Power Broker? Asking for a friend.

Recommendations for less sweeping books about the Subway are welcome, too! It's hard to know where to begin.

posted by Admiral Viceroy to Law & Government (5 answers total)

722 Miles: The Building of the Subways and How They Transformed New York by Clifton Hood is a good history of the NYC subway system. I read it a long time ago so I don't remember if there's any juicy trivia or minutiae, but I remember enjoying it.
posted by Quietgal at 4:38 PM on October 20

Try The New York City Subway System by Ronald Reis, which is part of the Building America series. Reis has written on several topics in 19th-20th century US cultural history, including a few sports biographies. (I haven't read it myself.)

Here's what is probably the jacket copy: "Teeming with a population of 3.5 million at the end of the 19th century, the island of Manhattan couldn't meet the city's demand for rapid transit with its horse-drawn trolleys and elevated train lines. New York City needed a subway system. After four years of digging and diverting miles of utilities and tunneling under the Harlem River, the city's residents celebrated a new era in mass transit on October 27, 1904, with the opening of a nine-mile subway route. In the century to come, the New York subway would grow and expand to a system that runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with 6,400 cars, 468 stations, a daily ridership of 4.5 million, and 842 miles of track - longer than the distance from New York to Chicago. Politics, graffiti, and unbelievable construction challenges combined to make the building and running of the New York subway system one of the America's greatest civic undertakings."
posted by rabia.elizabeth at 12:13 AM on October 21

Aaron Gordon is a journalist who has written about New York (and the subway in particular) for many years. (FWIW, he's got a nuanced and not uniformly positive view of The Power Broker).

His NYC Starter Pack reading list mentions only one book about the subway, and it's the same book Quietgal already recommended: 722 Miles: The Building of the Subways and How They Transformed New York by Clifton Hood.

No list about NYC books is complete without a book about the subway. Unfortunately, there aren’t many truly great books about the modern subway. 722 Miles is the definitive work on the construction of the subways, but that essentially stopped before World War II. You won’t find any insight into the subway since the 1960s because it is outside the scope of the book. It is also a bit dry, at least compared to many other titles on here. Still, there’s a lot of worthwhile insight into how NYC once built things and how the subway fundamentally changed the city’s geography.

posted by caek at 6:20 AM on October 21

Subwayland, a compilation of Randy Kennedy's columns for the New York Times, has a lot of interesting and unusual stories of the subway system.
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 6:33 AM on October 21

722 Miles it is- looks like there's not much out there! Would that I were a journalist. Thanks all!
posted by Admiral Viceroy at 12:55 PM on October 21