To Brooklyn with My Grandmother

by Clyde Borg 

The rumbling and screeching sounds emerging from a darkened tunnel always heralded the arrival of a subway train into a dim yellow lighted and white tiled train station. The trains were an olive drab brownish color, and had durable woven cane yellow passenger seats that seemed to be indestructible; black fans adorned the ceiling of each train. In the forties and fifties, when I used the subway, the trains were somber looking and free of graffiti.

During my pre-school years I traveled the subway extensively with my grandmother. I always carried a cloth shopping bag filled with my toys as I went back and forth from my mother’s apartment in uptown Manhattan to my grandmother’s home in Brooklyn. I remember her telling me that if we ever became separated that I should stay where I was, and she would come back to get me. 

Eventually my grandmother moved with my mother to an apartment in the Chelsea section of Manhattan. It was near the 14^th Street IND 8^th Avenue subway station that was the hub of an intricate network of subway trains and pedestrian tunnels. One could connect to the 7^th avenue IRT or the Canarsie line which connected to the BMT and the Lexington Avenue IRT. The underground tunnel from 14^th Street and 8^th Avenue to 14^th Street and 6^th Avenue also was a link to the Hudson Tubes, now known as the PATH, which went to New Jersey.   

It was from the 14^th train station that I took the most memorable trips on the subway with my grandmother. When I was about seven years old, I would travel frequently with her aboard the A train to the Borough Hall/Jay Street station in Brooklyn to visit my aunt and four cousins. I can still recall the stops that the train made before arriving at the Jay Street station: West 4^th Street, Spring Street, Chambers Street, Canal Street, Broadway/Nassau Street, and High Street. I was always excited and very anxious to play with my cousins at their apartment on Pearl Street.  Many times my grandmother carried large mason jars containing meatballs, spaghetti and tomato sauce for them. After leaving my aunt’s apartment, my grandmother would bring me to an old bookstore on Myrtle Avenue where she bought me used comic books for five cents a copy. I didn’t pay attention to the subway stops on the way home because I was always distracted by the comics my grandmother had purchased for me.

I continued to use the subway up until the time I went to college in New Jersey. The memories of those countless trips to Brooklyn with my grandmother still linger, and that 14^th Street station with its rumbling and screeching trains form an everlasting picture of a special time in my youth.

Clyde L. Borg is a retired high school teacher and administrator.  He has been writing essays and poetry since 1998.