Performing in the New York City subway is all about adapting your act to short attention spans and ogling passersby in a crowded, busy, noisy environment. I still remember the first time I saw Julio Diaz, the short Latino man who ties a life-size doll to his feet and then dances to upbeat salsa and merengue. His “partner’s” skimpy pink outfit and mop of dark curly hair caught my eye, and at first I thought she was real. But after a few spins the trick was up, and the source of the doll’s exaggerated hip gestures became clear. Despite the fake partner—or maybe because of it—Diaz draws huge crowds all over the city. He was even profiled by the New York Times.
Diaz has adapted his dancing to perfectly fit the underground environment. Other subway performers don’t, and they are not nearly as successful at attracting crowds or spare change.
At the N/R stop at 14th Street-Union Square, an older Asian man plays classical violin concertos on his one-stringed erhu. He’s not a MUNY, or Music Under New York, performer, but he’s got quite a clever setup. A recording of the music is manned by an accomplice on the uptown platform while he plays on the downtown side. He’s often out of tune and the trains occasionally throw him off, but the music catches your ear and begs a few coins whichever direction you’re going.
I’ve run into a young, dark curly-haired tuba player at a downtown stop near NYU a few times. He found the spot with the best acoustics in the station, a long corridor above the platform about 50 yards from the turnstiles. I could hear him the second I got off the train, but the deep notes resonated off the tiled walls so much that I couldn’t tell where he was until I was standing in front of him. He wasn’t exactly in a strategic location, and he hadn’t even brought along his case to collect coins. Far from making a good day’s money, he was here just to play.
A youngish policeman at the 14th Street-Union Square station said that subway performers were supposed to have a permit. But an employee at the MTA’s Arts for Transit said performers were allowed to play in the subway under their freedom of speech right. With or without a permit, performers must conform to accepted sound levels and present appropriate material. The officer’s casual attitude implied that they didn’t ask performers to move on very often. The number of musicians I saw on a recent Sunday afternoon reinforced this.
Performers like dancing Julio Diaz appear under the Music Under New York, program—one of four MTA Arts for Transit programs that aim to increase ridership by making the subways a little more pleasant. They don’t pay the more than 100 performers and ensembles they present yearly, so it’s up to the musicians to make it worthwhile. The performances can be hard to find because locations—from Grand Central Terminal, Penn Station, Rockefeller Center and Columbus Circle in Manhattan to Atlantic Avenue and Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn—are listed without specific days and times. But chances are you’ll run into one eventually.
In the subway stations and pedestrian passages beneath 42nd Street in Manhattan, I ran into four different acts, only one of them sponsored by MUNY. A “one-man band” just above the N/R platform playing self-penned rock tunes, had the MUNY banner behind him. He sang the vocals, strummed the guitar, and used four different drum petals to create a solid sound all by himself. He was a good musician, but his tunes were too ordinary to catch anyone’s attention. Few people stopped to listen to him. Even fewer donated. Just a hundred feet past him, in front of the painted blue construction wall between the 1/9 and the S trains, was a girl who claimed to be 14 years old. She sang pop tunes à la Whitney Houston and enjoyed showing off her great voice for the crowd that gathered. She hadn’t quite smoothed out all the wrinkles in her act, but onlookers were clearly amazed by her youth. More than a few slipped bills into the nearby gym bag.
Farther east beneath 42nd Street, at the Grand Central subway station, a woman in a wheelchair bellowed spirituals in the style of the great gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. Her plaintive appeal was fruitless before a fast-walking crowd that had somewhere to go. Just as I walked beyond the range of her voice, another came in. An older Jamaican man was singing a simple song with guitar chords to match. Wearing a red beret, jeans and sneakers, he crooned to the passersby, who paid him scant attention. After listening for a few minutes I realized he was singing the same tune over and over. He must have known that the sound in the tunnel between the S and 4/5/6 trains wouldn’t carry far enough for anybody walking by to hear more than one tune. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen a subway performer recycle his moves.
Earlier at 34th Street-Herald Square, I’d watched dancing Julio Diaz woo crowds of a hundred in precise three-minute intervals. He put on a CD and danced two numbers. Then he took a break, ostensibly to rejoin the doll’s hands, which had come apart in the act. He also changed the CD (as if he’d danced to the whole thing) and took a sip of water. The crowd dispersed, a few dollars lighter, not knowing how long it would be until he started again. But 30 seconds later he’d begin dancing, drawing in a new group of onlookers using the same routine.
It was a little disturbing how perfectly he had masterminded the set-up. What makes a performance profitable first and foremost is location: an open space where people can convene without feeling that they are in the flow of traffic. Second, thrills and laughs will open wallets. Third is timing: knowing when to take a break so that people will hurry on their way and a brand new audience will gather in just minutes is crucial. Subway spoils don’t always go to the most talented performer; with a little ingenuity, an artist can make the venue pay.
Julia Scott is a graduate student in the Jazz History and Research program at Rutgers-Newark.
