I held my breath in those elevators, as much to reduce the risk of acquiring TB as to see if I could simply accomplish the feat of not breathing for one minute.

I was in my twenties, studying medicine at Columbia, and there was a rumor that the elevators at the 168 th Street station had the highest amount, per square inch, of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in the entire country. When people ask me why I left New York, I usually answer the 1 train – not the train itself, but the elevator at the 168 th Street station, which I took nearly every day for the five years that I lived in the city. I was riding the 1 train the first time I heard Taylor Swift’s “Welcome to New York,” and I’m not entirely sure if I would have made the connection between the song and the Eula Biss essay, “Goodbye to All That,” if I had been anywhere else. – Taylor Swiftįor me, New York ended as soon as it began. When we first dropped our bags on apartment floors/Took our broken hearts, put them in a drawer/Everybody here was someone else before.