Good morning. It’s Tuesday. Today we’ll find out why you may sometimes hear commercials in the subway. We’ll also look at how the Manhattan borough president is filling community boards with members who are pro-housing development.
Not all of the sometimes-unintelligible announcements in the subway tell you where to find an elevator, where to find the police or what to do when trains are skipping your station. Some of them are commercials, just like on most radio stations.
In fact, one noncommercial radio station paid for some commercials in the subway last week.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the subways, has also broadcast audio commercials for television shows like “Gossip Girl” and the “Sex and the City” sequel “And Just Like That.” Last year, commercials for the movie “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” took that franchise underground to places the fictional archaeologist has never plundered.
The transit agency says the commercials, which can be heard on trains and platforms through the public address systems, are part of an advertising program that brings in $170 million a year. That figure includes revenue from ads on video monitors and posters in stations as well as from the commercials. The M.T.A. would not release a breakdown detailing how much money came from each type of advertising.
The $170 million amounts to less than 1 percent of the M.T.A.’s $19.2 billion budget. Still, The Daily News complained in an editorial last year that the Indiana Jones commercials were “an obnoxious sellout,” adding: “The folks who run the system should keep their grubby hands off the PA system, which must be reserved for useful information — and which, ahem, don’t work nearly well enough in that regard.”
The transit agency also would not disclose the rates it charged advertisers, like the public radio station WNYC, which bought time over several days last week for spots promoting its 100th anniversary. The commercials featured three WNYC hosts — Brooke Gladstone, Michael Hill and Brian Lehrer — plugging the radio station. One spot noted that the subway system had opened in 1904, making it older than WNYC.
Another spot told how the station had carried the first coast-to-coast broadcast: of the 1927 World Series. (The Yankees, with Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in the lineup, beat the Pittsburgh Pirates in four games.)
Other commercials mentioned lighthearted moments in the station’s history, like a 1963 story about noise limits for bells on ice cream trucks.
An earlier round of commercials in the subway drew complaints because of their noise levels. In 2021 The New York Post took a noise-level meter into stations on the Lexington Avenue line when commercials for “The Lion King” were playing. The reading was 99.1 decibels — louder than machinery in a woodworking class or the engine on a snowmobile, according to the nonprofit Center for Hearing and Communication. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health says that repeated exposure to workplace noise above 85 decibels is hazardous.
Some of the commercials for WNYC were heard in more than 350 stations (the ones that I heard were quieter than the usual M.T.A. announcements), and others in cars on the L line.
But there are 472 stations in the city’s sprawling system. Seventy of the stations that the commercials did not reach had been scheduled to get public address system hookups, but Gov. Kathy Hochul’s decision to put congestion pricing on hold prompted the agency to defer the installations.
WNYC said through a spokeswoman that the feedback on the commercials was positive and that the station’s listeners liked hearing familiar voices in unexpected places. But Mitchell Moss, the former director of the Rudin Center for Transportation at New York University, said that playing commercials was “not a wise or strategic use” of the public address system in the subway.
“The subway, where the audio part has been the noise of the train, is now being disturbed by the noise of a commercial,” Moss said. “This is really dangerous, because how are they going to get people’s attention in the event of an emergency or a disaster? People will be accustomed to tuning out the commercials.”
Aaron Donovan, an M.T.A. spokesman, said that “audio ads are designed, through the use of outside personalities, to sound clearly distinct from communications by M.T.A. personnel.”
Weather
Today will bring the peak of the heat wave, with temperatures reaching into the 90s again. The National Weather Service’s heat advisory, in effect until 10 p.m., means that the combination of heat and humidity will feel hotter. There is a chance of showers and thunderstorms in the evening, when the temperatures will slide but only to the high 70s.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Aug. 13 (Tisha B’Av).
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Putting pro-development appointees on community boards
Community boards in New York City are an unusual feature of municipal governance: They have no explicit power to approve or reject development proposals, but their opinions can influence City Council members who do.
Community boards also have a reputation for being a small but significant roadblock to building new housing.
Mark Levine, the borough president in Manhattan, has been trying to change that by using his power to appoint community board members who are open to change — and to replace those who would stand in the way. My colleague Mihir Zaveri writes that opponents are accusing Levine of capitulating to the real estate industry.
Of more than 100 people he has appointed or reappointed, he characterized more than 80 percent as “pro-housing,” as determined by a questionnaire he gives them. Tibita Kaneene, a banker, said he had to write an essay and go through an interview to prove his housing bona fides before Levine named him to a community board representing parts of the Upper West Side in 2022.
“What we’re seeing is a rapidly shifting consensus toward pro-housing policies,” said Annemarie Gray, the executive director of Open New York, a nonprofit that supports more development. The group has encouraged its members to apply for openings on community boards.
Critics of community boards say that members are not representative of the public. Homeowners and older people tend to be overrepresented.
Antonio Reynoso, the Brooklyn borough president, said that “part of the challenge in diversifying our community boards” involves seeing that renters and public housing residents are adequately represented. Like Levine, he has been making pro-development appointments.
Levine’s efforts have not come without controversy, particularly in Midtown Manhattan, where there are development projects around Penn Station and at a public housing complex in Chelsea. Several members of the community board resigned, criticizing the influence of “special interests” because some newer board members were affiliated with Open New York. After the resignations, an Open New York employee became the board’s chair.
METROPOLITAN diary
Sausage and peppers
Dear Diary:
On a summer Sunday when I was living on 56th Street behind Carnegie Hall, I ran the loop in Central Park and then returned home on Sixth Avenue.
A typical summer street fair was being set up on the avenue, and an Italian sausage truck was positioned at 58th Street.
“Great,” I thought. I love Italian sausage sandwiches.
I returned to the truck at about 1 p.m., bought one, took it back to my apartment and thoroughly enjoyed it.
At about 4 p.m., I decided to treat myself to another. When I got to the truck, there was a man ahead of me who had just ordered and was waiting for his sandwich.
I ordered one, and while I waited, the counterman brought the man in front of me his, and he began eating.
When my sandwich arrived, it was huge, with easily twice the amount of sausage, peppers and onions as before.
As I started eating, I noticed the other man looking at my sandwich, then at his sandwich, then at mine again. Finally, he looked at the counterman.
“What gives?” he said. “Why’s mine so small?”
“Oh,” the counterman answered without hesitating, “he’s a regular.”
— William L. Clayton
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Ash Wu and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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The post What’s That Sound in the Subway? It’s a Commercial. appeared first on New York Times.
