Where the Subway Cracks
New York, NY
2025, Senior, Creative Writing
I used to think nature was something you had to escape the city to find. It was something where people in fleece jackets disappear to on long weekends. Nature was the Catskills or the Berkshires, or at best Central Park’s Ramble if you squinted past the skyline and tuned out the wail of honking cars. Where I’m from, we had pigeons, sewer rats, and whatever pallid, drought-battered trees the city wedged into sidewalk squares. We had ivy clawing up the crumbling brick of tenements, playgrounds padded with neon astroturf, and the Hudson in its oil-slick shimmer. I used to think that this absence of nature was just a condition of city life, a tragic trade-off that all New Yorkers must make. I bought into the myth that nature was something we had lost and might never retrieve. But at some point, that explanation no longer put me at ease. Because even in the most industrial, overbuilt parts of New York, I discovered beautiful relics of the natural world.
It started with the dandelions in the subway station. Down in the underworld of squealing trains, in the soot-caked grit of the third rail, I saw a cluster of them. It was a bleary June morning, and I was late for school. I was hungry, sleep-deprived, and a bit grumpy. Someone had stepped on the back of my shoe getting off the F train, and when I glanced down at the tracks, ready to stew in my mood, there they were. Blooming from a crack where nothing was ever meant to grow, these lovely dandelions were brilliantly yellow and inexplicably healthy.
That is when I realized that New York is nature. What’s changed is our ability and our willingness to take care of it. We don’t notice the feral cats that live behind the old synagogue and sun themselves in the sliver of light between buildings. We don’t notice the moss creeping up the side of the deli on 10th and A, drinking from a leaky pipe and nothing else. We don’t notice the mourning doves nesting in the wiring above a busted laundromat security camera. Even the gum-pocked sidewalks look alive if you pay enough attention. When we stop noticing the wild beauty within our man-made monstrosity, we don’t pay respect to the most sacred thing of all. Instead, we surrender to a sterile, synthetic, and unfulfilling version of living.
It took me a while to unlearn that numbness and realize that nature did not have to be a place you visited when you wanted to take aesthetic Instagram hiking pictures. Nature was all around if you opened your eyes and heart to it. I found it most vividly on the East River Promenade, where I’d wander after school when I didn’t want to go home right away. That strip of railing and cracked concrete reeked of rust and seaweed, and something there was definitely decaying. The water was brownish and littered, but I loved it nonetheless. Because, for all its grime and damage, there was something very human about that river. It asked nothing of me but to notice. Its waves roared with a painful nostalgia, begging to be seen and cared for.
I started to wonder what it would look like if we treated the forgotten and grimy places like this, not as lost causes, but as living things worth loving back. First, I picked up a couple of crushed cans and sodden chip bags. Then, I fished a bloated flip-flop out of a tide pool. No one clapped or posted about it, but it felt like the right thing to do. Like the beginning of a conversation with the crashing waves I’d only ever half-listened to. So I came back the next day, and the day after that. Some afternoons I’d be alone, hunched over the rocks with a pair of gloves and a garbage picker. Other days, a friend would join, or a stranger would stop to help. One woman gave me a granola bar and told me her father used to fish off that pier before the water got too dirty. Another man said thank you and then kept walking, and that was enough. It felt like I was finally answering the river’s prayers.
Doing this filled me with a kind of joy I hadn’t known I was missing. There’s something about growing up surrounded by sirens and scaffolding that makes it hard to hear your thoughts. You start to forget what quiet felt like. You forget what beauty really means. I used to think you could only love nature from a screensaver of mountains or a vacation you couldn’t afford. But then you see a bee pollinating a bodega flower. You see a child tossing breadcrumbs to sparrows on the steps of a brownstone. You see a tiny patch of wild mint sprouting from the cracked tile of a community garden. And you realize: we are still of the Earth.
I’ve since stopped calling the city “unnatural.” I think cities are their own kind of ecosystem. Living in the city hasn’t alienated me from nature, but rather grown my hunger for it. It has made me attentive, grateful, and even reverent for the world around me and the few times a day I can appreciate the greenery. This year, I made a habit of taking my camera with me wherever I went, snapping pictures of trash tangled in branches, squirrels sunbathing on scaffolding, and snails clinging to bricks after rain. I didn’t know it at first, but I think I was collecting evidence. I wanted proof that nature was here and it needed us. And I needed that proof, because some days I felt like I was getting swallowed whole by the mouth of the concrete jungle.
I am still learning how to belong to this city and the Earth at the same time. Some days it feels like a tug-of-war between nature and the city girl in me. But then I go for a walk, and the world makes itself known again. My connection to nature is sauntering through a fast city. It’s choosing, again and again, to notice. It looks like remembering that I, too, am made of cells and salt and carbon, no different from the moss or the rats or the roots twisting beneath my feet. It’s recognizing that nature is here, blooming in the subway cracks.
Reflection
Reflection
I got the idea for this piece from an epiphany I had on a subway platform. I was late, tired, and irritated when I noticed a cluster of dandelions blooming between the tracks. It felt like the city was telling me something I’d never paused long enough to hear. That image took hold of me and I began to reflect on the ways nature persists, even in the most unlikely, unromantic parts of New York. My creative process was very observational. I spent months walking through alleyways, along the East River, and under scaffolding. I documented what I once overlooked: moss growing on hydrants, vines growing through fence holes, pigeons bathing in pothole puddles. This piece was pieced together from hundreds of details I began collecting like evidence. Through the theme Connections to Nature: Looking Inside, Going Outside, I learned that nature doesn’t have to be separate from the city, or from myself. I used to think of New York as sterile and nature as somewhere I'd vacation to. But I’ve come to realize that city life does not require us to rid ourselves of nature. My message to viewers is that it is so importan to notice the world around you. You just have to look down, look closely, and let yourself care. Even here, even now, nature is still blooming in the cracks.