Nah’msayin?

An ode to station Guy-Concordia, a.k.a. Metro Hell

OpinionsMichelle Pucci — Published August 24, 2015

It smells like someone soaked an old dirty rag in some of the water I can hear ominously dripping down the mysterious pipes hidden in your cavern. And the only respite from the densely packed oxygen-drained-carbon-air is the people walking slowly past me. Still, their stride makes more of a breeze than the metro platform can afford to produce, lacking one of God’s greatest and most-underrated gifts: ventilation. Which you have none of.

I won’t pretend to know how to design metro stations. Sometimes instead of being full of completely stagnant air, they’re too windy. The strong unsettling gust of hot air coming from the doors I’m trying to exit make me feel like I’m in some hurricane disaster movie, desperately inching forward. And other times I wish someone would just rip off the 30 feet of concrete dividing me from the outdoors as my stomach wrings the last real breath I took before descending seven flights for 10 minutes to get to the platform (Lucien L’Allier, that’s you).

I just know I’d never bring my grandmother here. I feel a heat stroke coming on, my heart beats faster—this is a health hazard.

And the metro doesn’t come for another 11 minutes.