Community Living Room

   The subway has changed from its original purpose as a mover of people in the city. The change came on slowly but quickly accelerated after the pandemic. Don't get me wrong, there are the morning and evening rush hours when the trains are full, but now that lasts only for about an hour at both ends of the work day. And the odd sporting event in South Philly. But it's a far cry from what it was ten or twenty years ago. In those many hours in-between the small portion left riding the subway are mostly it's residents. The homeless, the junkies, the mentally ill, and believe it or not those watching videos on their phones for  most of the day. The train cars have become a makeshift community living room.

   I ride the subway to watch and take photos, to observe its residents. They are very territorial, never interacting with each other, as if the other groups are invisible. I'm genuinely curious how they carve out spaces for themselves and then tune out the world around them. To me it's far more interesting than a rush hour train, when 95% of the riders have their heads down, buried in their backlit phones. All you usually see is the tops of people's heads.

   Besides these two very different groups, there doesn't seem to be much in-between. Gone are the people reading newspapers, the kids listening to radios, majority of the taggers and graffiti artists, the artist in general who use to sketch and draw the riders. Disappeared but not forgotten are the grifters, the buskers, and the generally interesting "weirdos".

  So what is the future for the subway?