How bad is the 1?

The 1, up close

The 1 is the original — the first line of the first subway system in the world, opened in 1904 as the IRT from City Hall to 145th Street. It runs the full length of Manhattan's West Side as an all-local train, from Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx down to South Ferry in the Battery. If the Bronx-to-Downtown express line (2/3) is the spine, the 1 is the muscle that stops everywhere.

What makes the 1 the 1 is how much of the city it string together at street level. It hugs Broadway for almost its entire Manhattan run — Washington Heights, the Upper West Side and its pre-war apartment canyons, Columbus Circle, Times Square, Penn Station, Chelsea, Greenwich Village, SoHo, Tribeca, and the Financial District. There is no other single line that drops you this close to the front door of a Broadway show, a Penn Station Amtrak connection, and a Wall Street desk in one trip.

Rider well-knowns: the stretch between 96th and 137th Streets is express-track territory on the 2/3 but slow-and-grindy on the 1, so don't expect to fly uptown. At 7 train enthusiasts know the 7 as "the 7;" on the 1 the quirk is the opposite — it's the dependable everyman line that rarely makes it into subway trivia, because it's rarely the problem. That's the highest compliment a New York line can earn.

Late nights the 1 reroutes onto the 2/3 express tracks south of 96th Street, which usually means the same train but an express-fast ride home if you board downtown. It's one of the more forgiving lines for someone making a rash late-night transit decision.