'Essex If You're Nasty': How Twitter Would Announce Subway Stops

NEW YORK — The doors of the subway car open and a voice, real or robotic, calls out the stop. The ritual is repeated countless times each day, drilling the station names into millions of commuters' brains.

So why not have a little fun with them?

That's what the Crown Heights comedian Charlie Bardey inspired hundreds of straphangers to do with a single Twitter post.

"jay street and needless to say metrotech," Bardey tweeted Wednesday morning, inserting a rote phrase into the middle of the name of a station he said he frequently passes through on his travels around the city.

It didn't take long for New Yorkers to get the joke — and start writing their own. His post had nearly 400 replies as of late Friday afternoon, most of them offering their own versions of hyphenated station labels.

Some were critical: "34th Street and unfortunately Penn Station." Some were courteous: "Broadway, and as per my previous email, Lafayette." Others were emphatic: "Hoyt, and I can’t stress this enough, Schermerhorn Street." Or suggestive: "Delancey Street...Essex if you’re nasty."

Even U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took the chance to pay tribute to her Bronx roots. "138th Street and, by popular demand, Grand Concourse," she wrote.

Bardey uses Twitter as an outlet for his comedy, and he's used to having a tweet go viral once a month or so. But he said he was surprised by the outpouring of replies, which suggested was a sign of the joke's universality.

"This is all language we just hear all the time every day and this is just bouncing around our brains," Bardey, 24, told Patch in a phone interview. "So to sort of put the two of those together — subway names that bounce around your head and then the inane language you hear at the office or at school bounces around your head, that go together — it just kind of makes sense."

The bulk of the city's 472 subway stations are named solely after streets or neighborhoods. But some are hyphenated combinations, such as Astoria-Ditmars Boulevard or Myrtle-Wyckoff. Others have notable destinations tacked on, such as Times Square-42nd Street or 81st Street-Museum of Natural History.

To Bardey, who grew up in the city, the station names are signposts that tell riders where they are on their daily commutes, "when you’re so bored and you’re dreading being at work or you’re desperate to come home." The familiarity makes them easy to play with, he said.

"These station names often come off so arbitrary in the way the names are constructed, but we have such a personal relationship with them because we hear them every day, all the time," said Bardey, who hosts a weekly show at Jones Beach Bar & Cafe in Bushwick.

The replies to Bardey's tweet seemed like a sort of celebration of the subway on a platform that's mostly used to complain about it. He sees them as reflective of the "commonality of experience" that New Yorkers share by riding the beloved but beleaguered train system.

"Obviously there’s so many problems with it. Obviously access to to it is a mess. There’s so, so many fair and honest critiques of the subway," said Bardey, who remembers studying the subway map as a kid. "I’m coming from a place of, like, I also really love the subway and I love what it does and I also love its potential to be better."