Living Room

By Marianela D'Aprile

Illustration by Rae Whitlock. Rae is an artist living and working in Richmond, VA.

Living Room

By Marianela D’Aprile

Lately when I get on the subway there are usually people living in it. By that, I mean that there is someone taking their shoes off. Or someone lying down across a few seats. Someone taking a swig from a blue Bud Light tallboy. Someone is unpacking and repacking their backpack. The long blue seat of the F train turns into a sofa, the train car into a living room. 

The other day I got on a very full Q, saw that five seats were conspicuously empty, then noticed that they happened to be across from someone who had fallen asleep across a few seats. His shoes were on the ground underneath the seats; he was covered by a blanket. 

In private, we show our humanity by letting loose. We walk around barefoot; we burp when we eat; we pick our noses, take our shirts off, unbutton our pants. In public — and specifically on the train — we show our humanity by doing the opposite of letting loose. We agree to stay out of other people’s way as much as possible. We suppress our individual comfort in favor of our collective ability to travel with a minimal amount of discord to wherever we’re going. We take up less room; we sneeze more subtly; we talk more quietly; we cough into our elbows; we squeeze our legs together. 

There is, of course, a level of individual tragedy in the shoes underneath the train seats and everything they imply — isn’t it so sad. Maybe some of us would venture to imagine that it could happen to us. Maybe others feel pity, or sympathy, or they’re so jaded they don’t feel anything. Maybe they simply want to get to where they’re going. The point here is not the nature of the person-to-person interaction, what we should or shouldn’t do when someone takes their shoes off on the train, but the fact that there are people who have to use train cars as their living rooms in the first place.

Thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, which has thrown the deep injustices that plague our world (as well as their potentially very simple solutions, if only those with power used it for the common good) right in our faces, we know probably better than we ever have before that this problem is a matter of political will. We know that there are units sitting empty all year round, that people buy property only to rent it out on Airbnb, that an ever-growing number of people can’t afford to buy homes, that others still can barely afford to pay rent. Increasingly, cities feel like webs of private spaces connected by ever-fraying threads of public space. 

Parks, the one public space where there’s no unwritten rule that you can’t let loose, where taking your shoes off and lying down for a nap can feel like a brush with paradise, are increasingly tightly controlled. In Tompkins Square Park in the East Village, sanitation workers will pull up and clear people’s belongings. Greenwich Village’s Washington Square Park had a 10PM curfew over the summer. In San Francisco, Salesforce owns a whole park, and even though it’s open to the public there are strict, enforceable rules, including that anyone can get kicked out. This encroachment of control and private ownership on public space, in combination with winter’s approach, means people have fewer and fewer places to take off their shoes, to rest,  if they don’t have a private place to go. 

The subway is supposed to be one of those threads of public space that links us to other spaces. Riding it is supposed to be a temporary state. Tragically, infuriatingly, absurdly, the place where many of us suppress our human needs—where restraint is an expected performance—is the only place warm enough for some people to have those needs met.

Marianela D’Aprile is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York. Her work on architecture, politics, and culture has appeared in Metropolis, Jacobin, ICON, The Nation, The Architect’s Newspaper, and elsewhere. She sits on the board of The Architecture Lobby and is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Coming up next in Weathered: “The Coat” by Kate Wagner

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