Zoo York Tunnel
Dubbed "Zoo York" by graffiti pioneer and rapper ALI (Marc André Edmonds), founder of the Soul Artists, the subway tunnel provided a "scene" where crews of Manhattan graffiti artists gathered at night. The tunnel itself was a "cut-and-cover" subway construction project which ripped through Central Park from 1971 to 1973. Extensions of the Broadway BMT and Sixth Avenue IND lines, continued north from their former 57th Street terminal stations, merged just south of the City Zoo, then snaked underneath the zoo grounds and out under Fifth Avenue, where they connected to the recently completed 63rd Street Line.
During construction, the site was left unguarded at night. Unauthorized entry was discouraged by a tall aluminum-sheathed wall erected around the open ground by the New York City Transit Authority—but this hardly deterred local graffiti writers from boosting one another over it and climbing down into the tunnel below. Down inside the tunnel, there were four sets of subway tracks (uptown and downtown IND and BMT lines) constructed on two levels deep underneath the park, creating something of a subterranean monkey-house environment for invading street kids to climb around and scrawl graffiti on.
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Famous quotes containing the words zoo, york and/or tunnel:
“The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals. Yet nowhere in a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal’s gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“You feel you could pucker up and blow away the miles between 49 Bard Road [Brixton] and that apartment in New York where I could be tomorrow morning, if the apartment still existed, if Peregrine still existed, if the past weren’t deeper than the sea, more difficult to cross.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“The only way to find out anything about what kinds of lives people led in any given period is to tunnel into their records and to let them speak for themselves.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)