Old New York.

Without going into the reasons why, I found myself looking at the Taking of Pelham 1, 2, 3. Not any of the stupid remakes they’ve made either (because it’s been done twice now) but, the original with Robert Shaw, Walter Matthau and Martin Balsam.

It’s one of my favorite movies.

Maybe I should qualify that. It’s one of my favorite New York movies. Especially because it is such a product of its day. It really brings me back to the New York I remember as a teenager. The New York of the seventies that was world’s away from the Disneyfied place the city has become.

What I really notice in the film’s opening minutes is how New York’s color scheme has changed so much and also how very different life was.

For example:

City buses were green, a really dark green (upper half) with sheet metal running along the bottom half.

Phone booths! A rapidly disappearing phenomenon, phone booths were actually that - BOOTHS! They were small rooms with a door! What a concept, it allowed people to block out surrounding noise. The phone booths in the movie on the platform are a fire truck red.

Vending machines were attached to the pillars in subway stations! I even remember this. You had small vending machines that would dispense gum (chicklets?) and other novelties about chest high on the platforms.

Aside from the typefaces all being very different, I love the grittiness. New York was a dirtier place, a used place. No matter how bad things may get we are so much better about that than we used to be. Come to think, I remember what a minefield the streets used to be before the city instituted the Curb Your Dog program.

In the opening fifteen minutes, I’ve already spotted a good couple of gaffes.

Martin Balsam enters the 59th street IRT station to get on the 6 (local) train but for some odd reason is shown descending the stairs down to the express platforms (the 4 and the 5), even though he is already on the 6 platform. Any east side rider knows the 6 comes in on the upper level at 59th street station with the 4 and 5 deep down underneath. Balsam is show going down stairs at the end of the downtown six platform that would actually take him to the express platforms and the connection to the N and the R (at that time).

Robert Shaw gets on at 28th St but that’s not the 28th Street Lexington Line station. The station at 28th St is open and a rider can see all four tracks and the opposite platform at that point in the line. I think Shaw is really at the 28th Street station on the Broadway line.

A cutaway show a 6 train down the track before entering the 28th St station but there is a stub track shown breaking off the main line to the right, Impossible because there is no switch on the local branching off to the right between 42nd and 14th streets.

This is another nostalgia post. Another post about a New York that doesn’t exist anymore. Again, it’s old, old, old from way back around Thanksgiving 2009. I watch the French Connection and I see the platform for the Times Square shuttle, so many movies that anyone today won’t be able to place because the city is always changing. Though as I said in an earlier post, my love affair with New York City is waning and I long for a place that no longer exists.