by Simone Blandford

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.

In Ley’s case, this crisis is the post-pandemic world. But at the turn of the twentieth century, the crisis was a product of the new radical environment of the subway itself. Its grand opening in 1904 marked a shift away from classed, expensive and inconsistent intercity rail travel to unclassed, cheap and commuter-friendly rapid transit. As the system provided working-class neighborhoods with much-needed access to the city’s core, New Yorkers from all backgrounds, classes and corners were forced to acknowledge one another, perhaps for the first time. In stark contrast to the heavily segregated public transport systems that characterized the Jim Crow South, physical divisions of space were challenged on the subway. This created new and unpredictable possibilities in a radically unclassed, unsegregated underground space. Faced with the subway’s potential threat to upheave the socio-economic status quo, some sought to reproduce familiar social hierarchies and imbalances. Subway reading like the Sun created an alternative, visual means of reifying division using the tangible presence of print media.

Before looking at an edition of the Sun, it is important to define what subway reading is (and what it is not). Wolfgang Schivelbusch first theorized the phenomenon of reading on rail travel in The Railway Journey (2014 [1977]) as a result of “visual perception [being] diminished by velocity” (55). Schivelbusch pinpoints this as the radical break from slow forms of travel to the unprecedented speed of the railways and the need to replace the lost visual stability with reading material (e.g., novels and newspapers). Subway passengers encountered similar visual challenges, but these were only one aspect of the subway’s experiential matrix. Riders were confronted with being plunged underground (something few had experienced), unending electric light, echoing tunnels and close proximity with one another (often standing up). In theory, the last thing passengers would want is more visual stimulation.

Yet, this underground transport system offered a new space that had yet to be capitalized upon. The subway system was very much a product of urban capitalist investment—its very existence was delayed because “responsible capitalists could not be found willing to undertake the task of building a road.” Thus, capitalizing on the chance for a captive audience, with perpetual light and guaranteed viewership, there was no hesitation in turning the subway carriage into a theater of commerce with what Ruth Comfort Mitchell describes, in her 1916 poem “The Subway,” as “Strident signs which are noises visualized” (55). The space was so ideal for advertising that, upon the system’s opening, the contractors Ward & Gow entered a legal battle with the city to demand the right to advertise without restriction (4). These advertisements—or subway cards as they’re better known—are what I term subway reading, as they offer us a uniquely democratic example of what passengers were actually reading rather than what they read voluntarily. It is in this unprecedented breadth of viewership that we can dig deeper into how these subway cards shaped social reproduction in the form of “good behavior” on the subway. Specifically, this subway reading invites us to question how we can read the Subway Sun as a reaction to the threat of a radically unclassed and unprecedentedly diverse space.

Although it wasn’t a secret that the Sun, the brainchild of one of the first public relations consultants, Ivy Ledbetter Lee, was a form of advertising, it functioned quite differently from the standard advertising format. Whereas, traditionally, subway cards would line the very top of the cars, the Sun was placed just below and above passengers’ heads. This, and their significant size, created ambiguity around their status as advertising bulletins, which was complicated even further when they began providing passengers with “neutral” information, from construction updates to shopping suggestions. Behind this seeming neutrality, they were still advertisements commissioned by the IRT, a corporation with private interests. This is a perfect example of how, as David Harvey argues in Consciousness and the Urban Experience (1989), companies can “shape social reproduction behind the seeming neutrality of their power to organize space” (23). Thus, when the bulletin “Courtesy from All to All” appeared in 1924, with its plea for “correct” subway behavior, it was inseparable from the interests and concerns of corporate capitalism.

As far as a “neutral” bulletin is concerned, “Courtesy” is fairly successful in obscuring any relationship to the IRT’s own economic anxieties. The title, with its hand-painted, rounded typeface in a reddish-orange color, is open, playful, inconsistent and almost childlike in its cartoonish appearance. This style departs significantly from other editions of the Sun, especially those dedicated to securing a fare increase like, for example, “Discovered!”. Here, the style is in keeping with the newspaper format, from which the Sun takes its inspiration. Unlike the lack of separation between the title and main section in “Courtesy,” there are columns, dividers and even a cut-out from a real edition of the New York based daily newspaper the Evening World. The typeface is consistent and angular, suggesting that the information—much like a newspaper—is to be taken seriously. There is no real need to dress this bulletin up, as it has a clear message and nothing to hide behind. The same cannot be said for the plea for mutual respect on the subway, which, with its casual and open style, suggests this is merely a reminder of something already expected of its passengers rather than a reaction to this new and unpredictable space.

The accompanying image, however, emphasizes an anxiety around expected behaviors among the subway’s mixed-class passengers. Again, in a disarmingly cartoonish style, the image features a fashionable but modestly dressed middle-class white woman who adorns a hat in the same color as the title’s reddish-orange text—the only two places this color appears. By mutual association, the woman and the bulletin’s message are brought together, and it seems as though she is the proverbial poster child for correct behavior on the subway. But this idea is complicated by the three white male figures around her. As a woman in the 1920s she could easily be alone in this image. Yet, in the first example of how the bulletin attempts to reify social hierarchies, her status as a model passenger is only true in relation to them. It may be tempting to argue that this is progressive regardless of who is around her. However, this acts more like misdirection, hiding behind the illusion of progress. We can compare this to present-day corporate-approved forms of progress (for example, rainbow-washing) that hinge on the condition that they serve a newly marketable audience and do not jeopardize profits.

In the case of the bulletin, this is a watered-down version of the New Woman of the twentieth century. The ideal of the New Woman was undoubtedly a step towards a form of gender equality but, like the initial waves of feminism, it only extended to financially liberated white, middle- to upper-class women. In this example, however, all the potentially controversial aspects of the movement are absent. What is left is a woman who is profitable—in her hat, fur-trimmed coat, shoes and bag—, aspirational—a picture of modesty and temperance—and, crucially, unattainable. In reference to Phoebe Snow, another fictional wealthy white woman used to advertise the upstate Lackawanna Railroad, Margaret Young calls this phenomenon “a conservatively liberated ideal with the fantasy appeal to both sexes.” In these images, women are non-disrupters; they do not pose a threat to the accumulation of capital and, therefore, represent the “proper” way to behave whilst still appearing progressive and new.

When we look beyond this misdirection, it is clear that the true arbiters of this space are the men around her. For the expansion and preservation of capitalism, the privileging of the white male body has been used in advertisements (including on the subway) since their inception, perhaps most infamously in the equation of cleanliness and whiteness in soap advertisements. In the same vein, the equation of good behavior with four white figures, one of which is an acceptable (read: profit-friendly) version of womanhood, is a form of preservation that says—to this radically diverse space—that whiteness is the picture of a “civilized” subway. Without physical divisions, this function is much harder to spot. But the reproduction of this idea is dangerous. It creates the fiction of a moral “obligation” to police the subway, which has real world implications that are still being felt today. Derogatory TikTok accounts now prey on the “incorrect” behavior of vulnerable passengers for views; the artist Jason Shelowitz took matters into his own hands by creating the Subway Etiquette Campaign in 2010; and, in the most extreme cases, the policing of behavior has led to violence against passengers of color. Most infamously, Bernhard Goetz became known as the “subway vigilante” in 1984 for shooting four Black teenagers, one of whom asked him for money. But as recently as 2023, Daniel Penny, a white former Marine, placed Jordan Neely, a Black subway performer who was in distress, in a chokehold that would end his life.

As Ley points out in her New York Times article, the idea that restoring subway etiquette is simply a matter of one group assimilating into dominant cultural behaviors is not an uncommon belief. But, when the behavior of vulnerable and marginalized passengers is being policed, leading to acts of physical violence, we must ask why. For the Sun—as an early proponent of “good” behavior—this was motivated by the need to preserve the IRT’s profitability in the face of this unprecedented space. Today, this legacy has transformed the subway into a key battleground for contesting the reproduction of gendered and racial hierarchies. This is not to deny the rich history of this contestation on American public transport, most famously the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, which successfully challenged racial segregation. Rather, this article highlights how, in the afterlives of Jim Crow, behavioral norms and prescriptions have become a means to perpetuate and reproduce social hierarchies on public transport—and in public spaces more broadly. By identifying this, we can work to deconstruct it.

Simone Blandford is a PhD student in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. Her thesis examines how urban fragmentation influenced Chicago’s radical literary tradition in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century. She is funded by AHRC-M4C and recently completed an AHRC-funded fellowship at the Library of Congress’s Kluge Centre. This piece is adapted from her MA thesis.

Edited by Thomas Cryer

Featured Image: Opening of the New York City Subway, October 27, 1904, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.