I love riding the New York City subway but I didn’t always feel that way. When I lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the1980s, I limited myself to traveling on the #1 train because the subway then was so dangerous. Decades later, I heard about the game “End of the Line” in which teens would board any train and stay on to its end point. I was immediately intrigued, imagining all the visual possibilities at the terminal stops. In 2013, I began photographing them and soon realized that the last stop for some is the first stop for others. That altered my perspective and this project.

I was not quite sure what I would discover as I traveled all 665 miles of subway tracks. Nearly 8000 photographs and ten years later, I am still amazed at where the subway can take me. Some stops boast special attractions or landmarks just beyond the turnstile, while other stations themselves are the attraction. I was especially drawn to the way the subway connects the lively ethnic communities which define this vast metropolis. People exhibit immense pride in their neighborhoods, their first stop on a journey to all that New York City has to offer.

This book explores the physical and metaphorical connections I discovered at each terminal point on every New York City subway line, from the #1 to the Z. Like the city itself, the lines are both historic and ever evolving. This is my ode to our times.