The Broadway Junction Sublime

On merciful architecture

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The Broadway Junction Sublime is something that's lingering with me. Something about the starkly working class crowds, streaming up the long staircases and escalators, all in motion to get where they're going. Feels like I'm deep in some hidden corner of the capitalist engine, where labor moves out of sight, quietly, passively, in a starkly liminal zone. Music sets the backing track to such a space. In this case, "Too Many Nights" by Metro Boomin. The beat fits it perfectly--something about it feels like a beautifully tuned machine. It's what Lefebvre would call Eurhythmia: the harmonious rhythms of labor.

Liminal zones seem to be the sites where the rhythms of the city become most visible. People move through them tracing visible paths and invisible plans. Plans that dictate where they're going, the connections they're catching, and thus how they move as a crowd. The crowd takes on its own lifeform and rhythm, a stream where no person is individuated but rather shows itself as simply part of the flux. This is a microcosm, because the crowd exists as an entity far beyond the line of sight. The crowd becomes the masses, a tapestry of interwoven plans or as Gwendolyn Brooks would call it "involuntary plans."

The architects are in a delicate dance with the crowd. A complex like Broadway Junction has been refined over decades to accommodate the millions of riders that pass through it. The implementation of escalators are an act of architectural mercy and itself a revelation of social norms: the way riders learn to stand on the right-hand side to let others pass by. And the breaching of those norms by those who don't do so. The sublime is how it all coheres and slides together like a finely tuned socio-architectural machine: the stream of people, of which the observer is one, flows easily almost effortlessly through the space. This is the experience of "gliding" with the mass of labor and through the tunnels of transit: one slips readily from one liminal zone to the next, like flipping the pages of a book, and the crowd becomes a blur of faces, coughs, eye contact moments, and so on. But individuated? Hardly! This is eurhythmia: the blur becomes a beat, a refrain, a steady rhythm that is built out by the expressive quality and internal logics of architectural affordances.

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There is something about Broadway Junction that strips back all pretense and allows the rawness of transit and its liminality to bare itself to the observer. As a flâneur, the crowd becomes a sort of shelter. One where I can easily slot into the flows of people and yet let my eyes record and take in the difference becoming ever more apparent as one slips away from the metropole. The basics of implied necessity, movement for work, becomes increasingly more apparent: in Manhattan one might be commuting or transiting as a tourist, but out here there is a different quality. People have to traverse vast urban distances to access services, work, or even to reach "The City" itself. This bare necessity and deep reliance on transit is visible in the raw resignation on the faces of the train's riders. It's a feel of being locked into the necessity of the system: not just the transit system, but the one of capitalism dictating the flow of the bodies of labor.

There is the reflexive sensation of entering into this peripheral zone as a flâneur. On the one hand, I'm transiting through this space as much by necessity as anyone else. On the other hand, my theoretical disposition is elevating me to look at it as if from the outside. Meanwhile, I remain in the flux and flow of the crowd, forced to wait as everyone else, but using this opportunity to keenly attune to my environment. An experience that's mediated by the Metro Boomin I'm listening to, who perfectly captures the soundscape of the complex emotions of being caught in a machine-like, dream-like dance with your surroundings. My own experience of being an observer is regularly interrupted by the mundane act of positioning my body in relation to other bodies, moving aside, watching my back, looking for the errant someone who might be acting out. We've all heard the stories of people getting pushed on to the track, and I'm keenly attuned to my surroundings as a protective measure alongside this more observational register.

I feel surprised, taken aback even, I can have such an experience of the sublime and one which lingers with me well after it's through. The sight of the bodies flowing upward and upward up the escalator are printed in my inner eye. They live there. "Too Many Nights" circulates in my head as if on repeat. What is this the sight and sound of? What does one say when they've found the sublime in an urban corner of the MTA? On the one hand this is an experience, on the other it's a simple lived reality, a slice of everyday phenomenological experience I'm becoming privy to. Yet through it all, I balance the persistent, nagging duality of being both an insider and outsider, by virtue of my critical distance.

Reflecting on this duality of being both an insider and outsider leads me to realize I'm no ordinary flâneur--one who wanders through the city for pleasure. Instead I'm closer to Walter Benjamin's flâneur: a figure who reads the city as a text to uncover its hidden social and economic relations. But beyond that, I'm not a detached observer of urban life but one with skin in the game: I'm also on my way somewhere, I'm not exempt from the flow of the crowd. In that sense, I'm not only reading the city as a text, but I'm also a figure within it. By doing away with the characteristic aimlessness of the flâneur, because I am, myself, moving with purpose, I'm creating space for a kind of autoethnographic inversion: my phenomenological experience in Broadway Junction becomes a kind of barometer for how the space is experienced more widely. And yet, there are more layers: my experience remains detached if not aimless. When I take this dispassionate stance, it allows me to read the station, attune to the flows of its crowd, and use these observations as the basis for my own social, infrastructural, and economic analysis.

By acting as an "engaged flâneur" I'm coming to recognize my unique position as both someone who experiences the mundane--the act of waiting on the train platform, riding up the escalator, but also experiences the theoretical: the crowd as raw labor in motion, conditioned on necessity. This second register is, perhaps, a starkly detached and analytical, systems and economically-oriented view of one's surroundings. Yet, it's precisely by bringing the analytical to the phenomenological the engaged flâneur can see. Seeing in multiple simultaneous registers is a methodological stance, yet the flâneur doesn't dwell on method. Theory and experience mix seamlessly, for theory is intended to explain and see what's in front of them. They bring existing theory to bear and expand upon theory only when it can't contend with the exigencies of experience.This approach is uniquely suited to sites where necessity, the social, and systems--be they sociotechnical or architectural--intermix.

People's lived experiences are often tied up in systems of necessity: the need to work, the need to eat, etc. Broadway Junction is an extreme case of a “system of necessity”. One where every movement is deliberate if mindless, governed by the longue durée of plans set in motion far outside this liminal zone. These plans, involuntary as they may be, hold sway over movement. And yet in the midst of this zone where necessity rules, one finds people pausing at the elevated gangway, peering out the windows, taking in a moment of respite only possible because of the existence of the windows. Such an act of architectural mercy creates the very possibility of breaking from the movements ruled by the involuntary plans. Here is a rupture in the mundane, enjoyed only by one out of hundreds of passengers, and yet that act (of defiance?) is a moment of solidarity between the architects and the traveler, a minor collusion that presses itself against the essential operational logic of Broadway Junction.

In our case, the engaged flâneur chooses to act as a rhythmanalyst, in the tradition of Henri Lefebvre. But the flâneur adopts this theoretical toolkit with care not to let theory obscure the phenomenological reality of the station. Eurhythmia becomes a felt experience: the engaged flâneur moves with the pulsing of the station, is attuned to how rhythms–be they of the crowd or of the transit system–pulse with one another by way of observation, yes, but also through the body of the flâneur whose movements are prescribed by the plans and destination moving them, the architecture of the station, and the ambient movement of the crowd becoming a steady, ongoing, rhythmic process of co-navigation of the flâneur’s body and that of the crowd’s multitudinous bodies. This complex of rhythms comes to form a refrain–a pattern of patterns–giving way to the felt experience of navigating this junction of the MTA.

This refrain is matched by the beat of Metro Boomin, playing in the headphones. Look around and see many ears in the crowd plugged into their own soundscape. The ambient refrains of the beat synchronize with the visual and sonic landscapes of the station. The felt resonance becomes a conduit for theorization: the beat creates a barrier between the flâneur and the station’s rumbling noisescape. The screech of the train, the cacophony of coughs, the echoing announcements are drowned out by a beat almost purpose-built to barricade the noise of the world while carrying the momentum and energy needed to push ever onward through the refrain of the involuntary plan. This barrier creates a certain energy to move with the stream, yes, but it also provides the insulating conditions for reflection and attunement to the phenomenological experience of the station. Just what an engaged flâneur needs to maintain the duality of insider and outsider. Music as method.

What is it about “Too Many Nights” which resonates so directly with Broadway Junction? Peter A. Berry of Complex describes the song “piles elastic Don Toliver melodies for a track that feels a little like an acid trip—the opiate effect of sounds that become their own experiences.” (Source) The beat’s synthesizers layer lush chords over an almost telephone-like trill and news-ticker-like bell. The acid synths give it the energy of a trip crossed with a machine insisting on propelling forward. The vocals are melancholy-yet-reassuring: “I guess you got what you wanted”. It all comes together to create the feeling of needing to move towards light in the dark, accompanied by the dream-like vocals of Metro Boomin, Future, and Don Toliver. “You get what you want, you want, you want” haunts the listener with fulfilled desire–the repetition a lure to move forward with the beat.

The repetition of forward movement is what resonates with Broadway Junction. Taken as an ambient track to the station’s stream, it becomes both a companion and a promise: moving forward until “you get what you want.” This hustle and bustle will be worth it: reassuring. This tempo matches the hurried steps through the station. It all clicks together, creating a sonic companion sharing the machine-like, dream-like quality of the station. “It's too many nights I went nameless”—reminding you: you’re just one of the crowd.