A Pox on the Brooklyn Bridge

The most beautiful part of the Brooklyn Bridge is a metal rod protruding from the edge of its pedestrian walkway. This rod is on the south side of the walkway, closer to Brooklyn than Manhattan, covered in rust and connected to a large pipe daubed with gloppy grey paint and plastered with graffiti stickers.

The most beautiful things on the bridge that are not part of the bridge itself are the dozen or so padlocks dangling from this metal rod.

Theater of the Tunnels

Screeches, wails, electronic static fuzzing the edges of some irrelevant PSA—“This is an announcement from the New York Police Department”—out of such bedlam come the sounds of another subterranean monster. Its lights glow in the distance. The columns separating the tracks break up the scene, like the edges of film frames flickering across a screen. Your train and this other train are edging closer, smoothly eating up the distance between them, looking like they will converge into one.

Then the tracks straighten out. The trains run parallel, two bits of flotsam in the same current.