This is an image from my ongoing series “Last Stop,” documenting the neighborhoods at the ends of all the subways lines in New York City. While many of the lines terminate in far-flung extremities of the city, a number of them end in Manhattan, like this one, the last stop of the L train at Eighth Avenue near the Meatpacking District. 

One of the basic facts of life when photographing New York is the ubiquitous, and powerful, presence of the street grid. You fight it at your peril as you chase down the sunlight between the tenements and towers.

If I never have a cent
I’ll be rich as Rockefeller
Gold dust at my feet
On the sunny side of the street
– Dorothy Fields

The streets of Manhattan are famously straight, and they all recede to the horizon in forced monotony, a tyranny of perspective that must be accepted. Resistance is futile, though one looks for breaks in the street wall, or takes refuge in parks that are few and far between. But there is always action on the corner where streets converge, where pedestrians intermingle and collide, where right angles interrupt the flatness of facades, and the world comes alive in three dimensions.

And the poets down here don’t write nothing at all
They just stand back and let it all be
– Bruce Springsteen

The L train from Brooklyn ends at Eighth Avenue where it intersects with the A, E, and C trains coming down from Harlem stretching out all the way to the beaches of the Rockaways. A dignified neo classical bank building now houses a CVS pharmacy with its slapdash red logo adorning a richly sculpted bronze clock beneath a beehive, a symbol of thrift, as industrious bees buzz around the clockface and pigeons perch above.

I’m shining like a new dime
The downtown trains are full
With all those Brooklyn girls
They try so hard to break out of their little worlds
– Tom Waits

I stood on the curb of a protected a bike lane, and centered my shot on the clock just above the subway entrance, and locked the composition onto the pilasters and columns of the bank. I made sure the poles supporting the traffic lights stood free of these architectural elements and pointed the camera slightly to the left to include the subway elevator structure. The stage set, I waited for the actors to emerge from the wings.

Now the curtain opens on a portrait of today
And the streets are paved with passer-by
And pigeons fly, and papers lie
Waiting to blow away
– Joni Mitchell

Secondarily, I was aware of the gaggle of people behind. A boy in blue with red shoes stopped briefly, a tall thin man separated from the crowd, and I could see that people were arrayed evenly across the frame. You have to trust your instincts. There is no time to analyze or second guess. Everything falls into place, as if you are in control, and chaos is ordered and tamed.

Don’t ever change, don’t ever worry
Because I’m coming back home tomorrow
To 14th Street
Where I won’t hurry
And where I’ll learn how to save
Not just borrow
– Rufus Wainwright

I saw the couple approaching arm-in-arm, an elderly woman in an overly long trench coat and someone younger, perhaps her daughter in a puffy winter jacket. They moved briskly toward the corner and the crowd swirled around them as if they were meant to be the focus of the scene. I made four frames concluding with the couple entering the crosswalk, the older woman gripping her cane tightly peering ahead over her reading glasses halfway down her nose. They held each other closely, striding forward, the daughter raised her hand to her face as if reacting to something her mother said.

It was a cloudy day when I took this picture. No shadows, no sharply slanted November light, no sunny side of the street. Every detail was equal like the composition itself, a multiplicity of visual anecdotes played out on an architectural set. The mother and daughter moving through and out of the frame, the elegantly poised man at center beneath the clock, the boy in red shoes who appears to be hamming for the camera (but is not), the blue jacketed man glancing at his phone, the woman carrying something fuzzy – maybe a dog – the people facing left waiting for the light to change, the transit worker in uniform lost in thought, the bottle and can scavenger bent over his double-wide baby stroller, stolen or found, who knows. No one notices that I am standing directly in front of them, like a conductor before an orchestra, except for one man off to the right who looks directly at me. 

We are all participants in this scene, in the dynamic of urban drama played out on the street. But were everyone to walk away, were the human figures to be erased, the urban landscape and architecture would remain, which is where this photograph begins and ends.

A concrete jungle where dreams are made of 
There’s nothing you can’t do.
Now you’re in New York 
These streets will make you feel brand new
Big lights will inspire you.
– Jay-Z