18 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER23, 2020
windows in subway cars are: full-picture
windows (the main windows in the mid-
dle), half-picture windows (the same as
full-picture, except smaller, to leave room
for the vents), door windows (oval, self-
explanatory), vent windows (long and
narrow, ditto), and motorman’s-vision
windows. Motormen need to be able to
see, the tunnels are sometimes freezing,
and many trains, like the 7, travel above
ground, on elevated tracks, for part of
their route. A motorman looks through
extra-expensive glass with heating fila-
ments in it to melt the ice and frost. For
a while, the 7’s windows were being bro-
ken so fast that the manufacturer, a com-
pany in Trumbauersville, Pennsylvania,
forty-six miles north of Philadelphia,
could not keep up with replacements.
At the moment, police are following
leads, including a man seen briefly in a
surveillance video. He is average-looking—
young, dark-haired, and slim, wearing a
blue T-shirt and a black bandanna for a
mask, and he carries a small backpack,
maybe to hold the putative hammer. Re-
cently, the 7 has been running without
problems, and it achieved an almost-best-
in-city mark of six hundred and nine-
teen thousand miles M.D.B.F., which
stands for “mean distance between fail-
ures.” During this respite period, Trum-
bauersville has ramped up production,
and new windows have refilled the tall,
neatly labelled plywood shelves in the
barn’s supply room.
The investigation is ongoing. The
window damage cost the Transporta-
tion Authority about a third of a mil-
lion dollars. Fewer windows have been
broken on the 7 train since September.
“The guy disappeared, who knows why?”
Gambino said. “Maybe he decided to
get a real job.”
—Ian Frazier
1
ATTHEMUSEUMS
TOGETHERAGAIN
I
n an October packed with surprises,
at least one was good. A visitor to
the exhibition “Jacob Lawrence: The
American Struggle,” at the Metropol-
itan Museum of Art, came away sus-
Rebellion, an uprising of Massachusetts
farmers that took place in the newly in-
dependent United States.) “I loved it
the minute I saw it. My husband agreed.
He has a very good eye. The price was
nominal. The colors were vivid. The
style was different from anything I had
seen. We knew who Jacob Lawrence
was, but we never invested a lot of im-
portance in it.”
Lawrence made his “Struggle” series
between 1954 and 1956, while he taught
at the Pratt Institute. Its subject matter
spans the nation’s early decades, begin-
ning with Patrick Henry’s “Give me lib-
erty or give me death” speech and con-
tinuing through the drafting of the
Constitution, the War of 1812, and west-
ward expansion, highlighting the agonies
of slavery and the experiences of Native
Americans. The discovered painting, the
sixteenth in the series, is titled “There
are combustibles in every State, which a
spark might set fire to. —Washington,
26 December 1786.” The line is from a
letter sent by the soon-to-be President,
warning of internal threats faced by the
young country. The series was split up
and sold, against Lawrence’s wishes, and
had never been displayed together in a
museum before.
The painting’s owner had begun to
suspect that her picture might be news-
worthy earlier this year, after she read a
Wall Street Journal article about the show’s
première, at the Peabody Essex Museum,
in Massachusetts. But she was about to
leave on a trip to Florida. “I thought, I
cannot deal with this,” she said. “There
pecting that one of five paintings long
missing from the series, which docu-
ments the nation’s turbulent birth in
thirty twelve-by-sixteen-inch panels,
was just across Central Park, hanging
in her neighbor’s living room. How did
she know? No image of the painting
existed. The two women have lived in
the same Upper West Side building for
going on sixty years. Pop-in privileges
are reciprocal; the museum visitor had
seen her neighbor’s painting hundreds
of times. At her nudging, the owner
made contact with the museum’s cura-
tors. A week later, the painting—speed-
ily authenticated—was on the Met’s
wall, reunited with its brethren.
“I’m not a collector,” the painting’s
owner said the other day, over the phone.
“I’m just a person, and I love pictures.”
The widespread excitement at the paint-
ing’s discovery was gratifying, but the
publicity had startled her. “I’m hoping
that my anonymity will be respected
and that I can go back to Citarella and
Fairway and my normal life.”
She and her husband bought the Law-
rence in 1960, when she was twenty-
seven. “I had a two-year-old and a three-
year-old, and I wanted them to have
rhythm classes, so I went to a music
school. And when I entered the lobby
there was a woman hanging pictures. She
said to me, ‘You have an honest face. Will
you watch my pictures?’” The woman’s
husband, Mac Fagelson, worked for the
Julius Lowy framing company. (“Very
prestigious.”) The couple was holding
an auction to provide music lessons for
children in need. The Lawrence was one
of the items for sale, and the young
mother bought it, for around a hundred
dollars. “It led to a twenty-five-year
friendship,” she said.
Fagelson went on to give the paint-
ing’s owner a philosophy of art buying.
“He said to me, ‘When you buy a pic-
ture, there are two things you must con-
sider. One is can you afford it, and two
is do you love it. Only time will tell who
becomes famous and who is obsolete.
So do not concern yourself with those
issues.’” The Lawrence picture had
checked both boxes. “I recognized the
content immediately,” she said. “I knew
it was the American Revolution.” (Ac-
tually, the painting, which features blue-
coated soldiers pointing bayonets at a
band of grimacing men, depicts Shay’s
Jacob Lawrence
