Bookstein Ezra - One-Track Mind: Drawing the New York Subway

ONE-TRACK MIND

Published by
Princeton Architectural Press
A McEvoy Group company
202 Warren Street
Hudson, New York 12534
Visit our website at www.papress.com

2018 Princeton Architectural Press
All rights reserved

Princeton Architectural Press is a leading publisher in architecture, design, photography, landscape, and visual culture. We create fine books and stationery of unsurpassed quality and production values. With more than one thousand titles published, we find design everywhere and in the most unlikely places.

All artwork by Philip Ashforth Coppola. The text contains material adapted from Silver Connections by Philip Ashforth Coppola 2013. Reprinted with permission of the author.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews.

Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions. All efforts have been made to ensure factual accuracy; any inaccuracies that remain are the responsibility of the authors.

Editor: Nina Pick
Design: Jan Haux
Typesetting: Paul Wagner

Special thanks to: Ryan Alcazar, Janet Behning, Nolan Boomer, Abby Bussel, Benjamin English, Jan Cigliano Hartman, Susan Hershberg, Kristen Hewitt, Lia Hunt, Valerie Kamen, Jennifer Lippert, Sara McKay, Eliana Miller, Wes Seeley, Rob Shaeffer, Sara Stemen, Marisa Tesoro, and Joseph Weston of Princeton Architectural Press
Kevin C. Lippert, publisher

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Coppola, Philip Ashforth, author, artist. | Workman, Jeremy, editor. | Bookstein, Ezra, editor. | Lethem, Jonathan, writer of foreword.
Title: One-track mind : drawing the New York subway / drawings by Philip Ashforth Coppola ; Jeremy Workman and Ezra Bookstein, editors ; foreword by Jonathan Lethem.
Description: First edition. | New York : Princeton Architectural Press, 2018. | Contains material adapted from Silver Connections by Philip Ashforth Coppola.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017037147 | ISBN 9781616896744 (alk. paper) | ISBN 9781616897314 (epub, mobi)
Subjects: LCSH: SubwaysNew York (State)New York. | SubwaysDecorationNew York (State)New York.
Classification: LCC TF847.N5 C582 2018 | DDC 741.973dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017037147

Jonathan Lethem

I remember one day, during my short-lived participation in the Music and Art High School soccer team, going north from Manhattan after school, the direction Id never otherwise go, to Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx for practice. (I lived in Brooklyn and traveled to Harlem every day for school on the A train.) We were having dinner that night with friends who lived in Staten Island, and it occurred to me, on the subway headed south, that if I diverted to Queens on my way to the dinner and dropped in on my grandmother in Sunnyside, Id have hit all five boroughs in one day. This act may be routine for marathon runners and mayoral candidates, but it gave me a little shiver of completist satisfaction to do it.

I remember, also during high school, my friends and I finding fresh Keith Haring chalk drawings on the empty black billboard frames in the 135th Street station and smearing them with our hands and laughing about it. We saw the Haring drawings all through the system those days, and we resented him a little for it, in our brat-punk way; we resented him simply for having been there before us, for seeming to be everywhere.

I remember Darius McCollum, who spent his teenage years and beyond impersonating NYC transit workers and illegally driving trains, and got himself sent to Rikers Island for doing so. And I remember Keron Thomas, who at sixteen practiced for months for a single remarkable three-hour joyride as a fake motorman on the A train, one in which he successfully transported thousands of New Yorkers to their destinations with barely a hitch.

I remember the first time I really noticed the Astor Place beaver mosaic, like so many before me have done and are likely doing right at this moment, and marveled at New Yorks capacity to persistently disgorge secrets hidden in plain sight, lost histories in ruins and still a part of the (barely) functioning infrastructure, the eccentric system of public trains, which had actually arisen as two rival private rail systems, and which everyone took for granted as if it had grown there, a natural formation, and which most people only complain about or silently endure. I remember trying to conjugate that beaver mosaic with the name of the station and with the portion of the city aboveI was surely visiting to go to some Astor Place club, or teenage partyand failing. Could there actually have been a beaver dam at that site in living human memory? And if so, why would it be commemorated in the stations tilework?

You may ask, now, why on earth would I compare these inadequate and fitful and irreverent and even illegal expressions of surplus fascination with the New York subway system with the titanic accomplishments of the great self-appointed scholar and copyist of the systems decorations, Philip Ashforth Coppola? Coppola, who with saintly intensity has burrowed into the fading archives, dwelling there for decades now like Kafkas creature from The Burrow, recording and tracing that which speaks to him at a level deeper than most could imagine? Coppola, whose hand and breath and presence are like those of a dutiful ghost, so that he passes largely unseen, claiming no glory for himself, only enlivening and illuminating the darkening record, the accomplishments of men who passed before our time and who were likely, even willing, to be forgotten? Why, I might as well compare him to a graffiti artist!

Well, Ill do that too. In one sense, sure, a graffiti artist is Coppolas exact oppositea defacer, a proclaimer, an impulse artist. Yet, like some of the other forms of subway obsessives Ive mentioned, I think the NYC graffiti artists desire arises from a similar place, from the urge to find a way to talk back, whether in a whisper or a scream, to the great secret system of the subways. For the New York subways are like a magical nervous system, or a secret, vastly distributed spare brain, which every serious New Yorker understands has the power to speak to him or her in a mythic voice, even if one chooses to ignore it. It might be a great burden, this listening; we might only choose to do it momentarily, or to call it to a halt after a certain unbearable intensity has been reached, and cry Enough! Well, here might be a good-enough description of Phil Coppola: he is the voices greatest listener, the mysterys greatest detective. He is the man who never cried Enough! Like a character from Borges, his impossible Silver Connections project proposes a map that is the exact size of the territory it describes. Most of us can only envy an artist, and a life, as unwavering and pure.

Jonathan Lethem