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I enjoyed this snarky account, from Cornell Woolrich, of a ride on the NYC subway, circa 1932:
I looked back and her house was gone, sunken, swallowed up in the masonry quicksand of New York. I sank into it myself a moment later, plunging into an iron hut with a ground-glass roof that stood on the sidewalk, down a flight of cement steps laved by tepid air, onto a concrete platform flooded with tawdry dusty electric light. A roar, a hiss, a current of wild air carrying leaves of newspaper on its bosom, and the opposite platform had vanished behind a long row of dirty lighted windows and pneumatic doors that slipped effortlessly back like secret panels in a detective story. But when they attempted to close again, there was always some latecomer, now at one car, now at the other, to squeeze himself in at the last moment with a sheepish grin of satisfaction, until at last a guard came and glowered and pulled each one definitely shut with a swing of his arm.I saw that there were seats, but I was so used to standing that I stood anyway, my wrist linked around a porcelain hoop. I felt more comfortable standing. I was one of that vanishing race who, when they had a seat, relinquished it to the first woman who entered, unless they were too stout or smelled of garlic. This was an express, hence all the locals going in the same direction passed it with quick facility. Laboriously it overtook them at the in-between stations, only to be passed again a moment or two later. The idea seemingly being that, since an express was an express, it could rest on its laurels.