The G. The short train. The hipster zipster. Site of your post-last call, 4 a.m. nightmare where-the-hell-is-this-thing wait. The New Jersey of subway lines.
For as long as anyone can remember, the G has been the butt of subway jokes. (Why did the G train get dumped? His girlfriend was disappointed in frequency and length of service.) Probably because New Yorkers have long hated the G more than any other train in the city.
But in the past year or so, riders of the Church Avenue-to-Court Square line have turned the maligned train into a badge of neighborhood pride. From Park Slope to Greenpoint, riders who have no choice but to saddle the G have started to stick up for it, and some of them have even adopted it as a sort of abused stepbrother.
“You have the most to gain from taking the G train. When the G train is arriving . . . it’s like complete, pure joy — like something is going right, like this was meant to be,” gushes Chris Schnaars, 31, who lives near the Carroll Street stop in Carroll Gardens. “I have nothing but love for the G train.”
You can find songs about the G on YouTube, mentions of it in pop culture and on craft items on Etsy that say things like “I’d take the G for you.” It unites what many people consider to be the most fun parts of Brooklyn — Greenpoint, Williamsburg, Bed-Stuy — and just a bit of Queens, with late-night trains bearing a battered,weekend-warrior feel.
The G even made its way into the off-Broadway play “F#%king Up Everything,” which rips on how a G that’s not-running can ruin a night of potential romance.
G riders admit it may be a kind of Brooklyn elitism — it’s the only train that doesn’t enter Manhattan — or merely Stockholm Syndrome that has led to their embrace of the line. But for one Brooklyn band, their love of the G actually got them to Stockholm.
Brett Moses, 25, and Nick LaGrasta, 26, who make up the band Teen Commandments, saw a flier for a contest last year that Brooklyn Brewery was holding: Write a song about the G train, and the best one wins a trip to Sweden.
“We thought it was sort of absurd and wonderful,” Moses says. “We’ve been caught waiting for the G train a million times at night.”
They scrambled to put a tune together and came up with “No Burning Headlight,” a dreamy, Pet Shop Boys-inspired number that focuses on the G’s most positive attributes rather than its failings. It’s a “Take the A Train” for the Google Maps generation.
“We delved into the moment where bars have just closed, a bunch of young people are stumbling around in the subway, waiting for the train to come,” Moses says. “It’s that last opportunity for something interesting to happen.”
There’s a reason they’re so effusive about the line: Without the G train, there would be no Teen Commandments. Not only did it give them a reason to start recording and a topic to write about, but almost all of their shows are located near G stops.
But here’s the secret about the G: It’s really not that bad. In fact, compared to the rest of the subway lines, it’s actually pretty great. G riders faced fewer service alerts than all of the city’s subway lines, according to a study released last year by the Straphangers Campaign.
“The G train gets a lot of hate but. . . it’s kind of like the turtle of the train system: slow and steady,” says Moses Gates, author of the new book “Hidden Cities: Travels to the Secret Corners of the World’s Great Metropolises.” So when the Riders Alliance, a grass-roots transit advocacy group, took up the G train as a cause, it quickly found community support.
“The first thing we hear is how much people rely on [it],” Riders Alliance executive director John Raskin says. “Most people who live along the G train don’t have other subway options.”
This could be the G’s big coming-out year. Last summer, to much rejoicing, the MTA announced it would make its temporary G five-stop extension to Church Avenue permanent. Later this month, the stop the G and F share at Smith and Ninth streets (also the tallest subway station in the world) is finally expected to be back in service after two years of construction. And, most notably, a riders’ coalition has pressured elected officials to launch a full review of the line for the first time ever, looking at ways to improve it, which could include more transfers and more trains.
The MTA agreed to review the line, with results expected in June. What do riders want? More frequent trains, more transfers and better communication about where the damn thing is going to stop on the platform. Because it’s a short train of just four cars (most trains have eight or 10), the G tends to stop in the middle of the platform.
“That’s what we call the G-train sprint, if you’re not standing in the right place,” Raskin says.
For some, the G is one of those great quirks of city life.
“It’s such a diverse crowd versus other trains,” says Abby Kirschner, who along with her boyfriend entered the Brooklyn Brewery contest. “I certainly like it more than the BQE.”