The moment on March 8, 1997, learning that rap icon Biggie Smalls just died. A chance encounter between two book-lovers on a morning commute. The eerie, uncomfortable silence of Sept. 11, 2001.
All of these moments, experienced in New York City’s busy and bustling subway system, are being captured and chronicled by Bronxite Christina Baez in her podcast “The Subway Portraits” — a project that began to form in early 2019.
For Baez, special moments of her life have taken place on the city’s rumbling trains. Moments like the first “I love yous” she shared with a then-partner on the uptown D train that led to the couple sharing headphones and playing love songs until the train’s final stop at Norwood-205th Street.
The inspiration for “The Subway Portraits” — where subway riders anonymously submit testimonials that are then highlighted on the podcast and animated shorts on YouTube — was sparked on Baez’s favorite train line, the red 1, which begins and ends at her favorite train station, Van Cortlandt Park–242nd Street station.
Baez said she began using a sketching app in her phone to create finger-line portraits of nearby commuters. This would begin feeding a curiosity within her to compile a living, breathing digital archive of subway riders and their memorable experiences in the 118-year-old subway system, launching the podcast in September 2020.
“Sketching the faces of my fellow commuters ignited a deep curiosity within me. We all come from different backgrounds, and yet we share this common subway system as a means of transportation,” Baez told the Bronx Times. “These small, intimate spaces connect us, even if we don’t know each other on a personal level.”
Each episode of the podcast is roughly 15 minutes, features around five unique stories, with tales transcending different decades and providing an audio and visual time capsule of the city’s subway system. The podcast invites anyone who has experienced a subway ride,…
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