Silencing the Subway

Inside a high-tech effort to minimize the maddening racket in the New York underground.

Photos by Emon Hassan

If you’ve ever stood in the Spring Street subway station in Manhattan and asked yourself, “Hmm, I wonder if standing here is a terrible idea?” then a quick consultation of the noise exposure standards promulgated in June 1998 by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health will show that, indeed, standing there is a terrible idea. During the lull between trains, the station is a quiet enough place. You can hear a woman’s boot heel clacking against the concrete platform, the MetroCard reader’s piercing electronic beep, the click-click-click of spinning turnstiles, a train in an adjacent tunnel shaking the walls with tectonic rumble.

This is the rush hour’s quietest moment, when noise levels inside the station drop to a low of seventy-one decibels. The hush, on a Thursday morning in January, lasts eight seconds.

An uptown 6 local train arrives. Its doors open with a staggered “thunk-unk-unk”; the fans inside the train’s twenty roof-mounted, six-and-a-half…