In 1979, the rate of serious crimes in the New York subway system was 250 per week. Six murders occurred in the first two months of that year. No subway was as infamous or dangerous. Literature and film have recorded the dark underground of the city, so striking and graphically interesting that it still appears in the media today, as in The Get Down, for example. Almost dystopian portraits, from 1977 to 1984, by Willy Spiller fill the collection Willy Spiller’s Hell On Wheels: Photographs from the New York Underground, which now generates nostalgia and aesthetic emulation, but at the time it was a portrait of a depredated reality and an underworld that existed beneath the city.
