The 'P' Train

Take the PATH train.  I’m on the western bank of the Hudson River, sipping espresso, watching the rain fall.  I need to go over to Manhattan soon.  Half a century on the planet with a life never too far off pivot from New York, but I have never taken a PATH train.  Unless you live in New Jersey, what reason would you ever have to take the PATH train?  You know they exist, shooting off, westward ho’, but they always seemed like someone else’s mass transit.  

“Where’s the PATH train?”  “Right there at Exchange Place.” She points to a building immediately adjacent to ours.   Seems easy enough.  I settle my bill, grab my luggage and head out into some ferocious wind.   My “Metro Card” is down to nickels and dimes so I stand in line to charge it up and consider all the traffic heading down the escalator. 

It’s a long way down.  But we are abutting and about to head underneath a fjord.  The train rolls and it feels in every way like a New York subway.  Why these lines were not just fully incorporated into the greater metropolitan system, with names like “the P Train” is beyond me.  If it were simple we’d have an express train that connected the three metro airports by now, as well. 

The jaunt over is quick and soon I’m heading up a new, London Tube-like escalator that brings me up into what must be a new, and nearly completed World Trade Center station.  I schlepp my luggage along, looking for signs to the subway.   Surely there must be a way to connect directly to the city subways from here?  There is not.  I pass under the great maw of a grey entrance, beneath a huge “PATH” sign and out into the rain and the Wall St. rush hour. 

Chambers St. Station isn’t far.  To the side is what must be the 911 Memorial.  It evokes both the twisted remains of the towers and the bleached bones of tremendous whale.  I look back in the rain, and there is the Freedom Tower.  I have never liked this building.  I have never liked the name.  The early designs were published and looked remarkable.  These were scrapped and we were left with this dime-a-dozen design, that should be some other aspirational city’s version of a tall tower, with the uninspired circular crest, looking for all the world like it still isn’t finished.   It feels like an intruder here in a city that will accept almost anyone.  Looking up, doesn’t feel anywhere near as tall as the Twin Towers once did, when you stared up at them.  Perhaps I was just younger then.   I know, I know.  People once hated those buildings too.