FIRST STOP LAST STOP: THE BRONX 

I love riding the New York City subway, but I didn’t always feel that way. When I lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the1980s, I limited myself to traveling on the #1 train because the subway then was so dangerous. Decades later, I heard about the game “End of the Line” in which teens would board any train and stay on to its end point. I was immediately intrigued, imagining all the visual possibilities at the terminal stops. In 2013, I began photographing them and soon realized that the last stop for some is the first stop for others. That altered my perspective and this project. 

I was not quite sure what I would discover as I traveled all 660 miles of subway tracks. Nearly 8,000 photographs and ten years later, I am still amazed at where the subway can take me. Some stops boast special attractions or landmarks just beyond the turnstile, while other stations themselves are the attraction. I was especially drawn to the way the subway connects the disparate, lively ethnic communities which define this vast metropolis. People exhibit immense pride in their neighborhoods, their first stop on a journey to all that New York City has to offer. 

First Stop Last Stop: The Bronx explores the physical and metaphorical connections I discovered at the beginning/end of all seven lines which travel to the Bronx: 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, B and D.  There are 13 miles of beach on Long Island Sound in Pelham Bay Park on the 6 Line. The only NFL-sized football field in the NYC Parks System is within steps of the Norwood station on the D Line.  The Woodlawn Cemetery at the Woodlawn stop on the 4 line is the final resting place for many notables: Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Madam C.J. Walker, Celia Cruz, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Herman Melville.  The New York Botanical Garden is the gem to be found a short walk from the Bedford Park Boulevard station on the B Line. On the 2 Line, in Wakefield, the Redeemer Evangelical Church was featured in the 1970 movie Love Story.

Like the city itself, the lines are both historic and ever evolving.  This is my ode to our times and The Bronx.

Sponsored by

The Fine Art Program and Collection at Montefiore Einstein

The Gallery of ARTFul Medicine Montefiore Medical Center

@ Hutchinson Metro Campus

1250 Waters Place, Tower One Lobby, Bronx, NY 10461

For more information on the artist, please visit

www.RitaNannini.com            @RitaNannini

Subway Icons and Map Courtesy of the New York Transit Museum