Growing Up in the Bronx — Subway Surfing, Bus Hanging, and the Risks We Never Thought Twice About

There is a version of New York City that older residents carry around with them that never quite makes it into the travel guides or the real estate listings. It lives in specific memories, specific corners, specific moments where things could have gone very differently.

For a lot of us who grew up in the Bronx, the subway was never just a way to get somewhere. It was a dare. A ritual. A place where you figured out who you were willing to be in front of your friends. Riding between cars, surfing the outside, hanging off the doors. Nobody assigned it to you. You just watched the older kids and eventually you were the older kid.

The buses were no different. A group of us used to hang off the back like it was nothing. One afternoon a fire truck pulled alongside and the firefighters had to flag down the bus driver just to let him know we were back there. That was the world we moved through growing up in the Bronx. First responders intervening to save us from ourselves on a random weekday afternoon.

The friend who fell from the bus door broke his arm badly. He was fortunate. Not everyone was. A guy I knew jumped and lost limbs. An acquaintance fell between the train and the platform one night and did not make it. A kid from my school was on top of a train and fell and was killed. These were not strangers from a news ticker. These were people with faces and names and histories.

What I think about now is how unremarkable all of it felt at the time. There was no dramatic moment where anyone sat you down and walked you through the math of what you were risking. It was just the texture of growing up in the Bronx. You moved through it and you hoped the people around you moved through it too.

Some of them did not.

I have always wondered how many people from this borough and this era carry a similar count. Not the abstract statistics but the actual personal inventory of people they knew who got hurt or killed doing the exact same things we all did like it was just another afternoon in the Bronx.

My guess is more than most people would expect.