![]() The Taking of Pelham One Two Three takes place nearly fifty years ago, and yet nothing about its representation of the subway experience feels dated. The Taking of Pelham One Two Three represents the subway for what it truly is: a paradox, a massive and sophisticated public transportation network in a famous city, in charge of carrying millions of people to their destinations every day, pathetically held together by rust and the strenuous labor of a handful of beleaguered-and no doubt severely ulcerated-civil servants. In The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, the subway is cumbersome, inefficient, inconvenient it is dirty, dilapidated, and neglected it is stressful, exhausting, and dangerous. The film was shot in a real subway tunnel near the defunct Court Street station on the Fulton line in Downtown Brooklyn (a location which is currently home to the underground New York Transit Museum).īut it’s mostly because the film captures that unique, ineffable aura of the New York City subway system, an aura that has apparently defined it through these many years. Some of this is because of the setting the variety of train cars which features prominently in the film is aesthetically similar to the kind used today on the IND lines (the A, C, and E trains). ![]() Indeed, to ride the subway in New York is to participate in a kind of temporal chiasmus-a sequence of experiences that seems to develop as it goes on but is simply repeating and reshuffling the same components over and over. If you ride the subway in 2022, you might as well be riding it at any other point in time. A sleek 2009 remake starring Denzel Washington and John Travolta insisted that a technological gulf separated the post-millennium city from its 1970s counterpart, but even following the MTA’s inclusion of sophisticated telecommunication systems (such as the Communications-Based Train Control, or CBTC, signaling system that was first installed on the L line in 2000), the experience of the New York City subway system didn’t change that much for the great many not working in its control rooms.
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