West Side Canvas: Getting There

Painting and essay by Robert Beck

New York has a number of options for getting from one place to another, especially if money isn’t an issue.  That’s the way a lot of things are going lately.  Fortunately, I can walk to and from my studio and most of my subjects, but when I’m carrying a load or it’s too far to drag an easel, I go for a cab.  If the weather gets bad, the subway is a block from home and a block from the studio.  That back-and-forth is the bulk of my travel.  I don’t take a bus that often.  

As a kid, back in the fifties, I loved buses.  There were two lines with routes that passed my house in Bergen County: Public Service and Red & Tan.  I rode buses, subways, and trolleys when I visited my relatives in Brooklyn.  My grandmother was an expert on the routes and times, and there seemed to be a way to get anywhere, from the Statue of Liberty to the Bronx Zoo.   We moved to the country in Pennsylvania when I was thirteen, where public transportation was sparse, and I pedaled a bike or stuck out my thumb until I got my license three years later.  A car was the only way to most places.  But now…New York is my home, where the long buses roam, and the cabs and the subways all play.

The long buses fascinate me.  They make sense, but the roads aren’t always quite suited to them, with construction obstacles, delivery trucks, police and fire activity, and sudden swarms of pedestrians not paying attention.  At least emergency vehicles have means to get your attention, punitive as they are.  The driver of an articulated bus can be dealing with a delivery vehicle that’s unsuccessfully executing a U-turn in front of her on 79th while its back half is still on West End.  It’s a job I don’t envy.

The inside of a bus is a predictable and easy-to-clean environment.  It moves to accommodate you; lowering, bending, gently rolling, taking you where you want to be.  It does the navigating, allowing you to put the energy you spend maneuvering the city sidewalks to use elsewhere.  It’s nothing like the subterranean gloom of the subway, with its echoes, screeches, and kaleidoscopic rushes of light.  Going down those steps is like entering a Hieronymus Bosch painting.  On the bus, you get to gaze out the windows as the neighborhoods scroll past.  You can think big thoughts without getting clobbered by an electrically propelled jerk.  If it’s not crowded, you can just zone out.  There is peace in it.  

At night, the lit windows reveal riders in Hopperesque isolation, silent in their own thoughts —a traveling Nighthawks.  When I would take my dog Jack on his late walk, long after the rush, I would see crosstown buses lumber through the darkness with a half-dozen passengers wrapped in the glow, dozing or staring at nothing, going home, going to the night job, going to meet a friend.  Held together in that category of life called “In Transit” on the way to their own somewhere.

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See more of Robert Beck’s work and visit his UWS studio at www.robertbeck.net. Let him know if you have a connection to an archetypical UWS place or event that would make a good West Side Canvas subject. Thank you!

Note: Before Robert Beck started West Side Canvas, his essays and paintings were featured in Weekend Column. See Robert Beck’s earlier columns here and here.

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