Nearly 20 years after the attack on the World Trade Center, the 1 line Cortlandt Street station finally re-opened the year before last. It took that long, the destruction was so total. It’s a beautiful subway station … which puts the rest of the MTA to shame, where the norm is rickety swampy falling-apart aesthetics across the boroughs. New Yorkers go to other cities and are AMAZED at how nice the public transportation is. There are places to SIT. It doesn’t RAIN INSIDE. There’s AIR CONDITIONING and ESCALATORS?? The MTA in NYC is a disgrace (although I have to say, I can’t wait for the day when I can be jammed inside a subway car with a hundred other people). But I digress. The platform for the 1 line is spacious, and the walls are covered in marble mosaic writings from the Declaration of Independence and the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
I took this in 2019, a terrible terrible year, and I was so moved by the sight of this guy putting up the panels of these very very important documents. It was emotional.
