Subway City explores New York's transit system as both fact and metaphor. Brooks traces the development of the subway from its inception as the newest and most efficient public transportation system to its decline as an overcrowded and dangerous part of city life. The crowded cars gave Harold Lloyd material for comedy, fueled William Randolph Hearst's crusade against the Traction Trust, and convinced Lewis Mumford that improved transit was a futile means of solving the city's problems.

Brooks explores films which have dramatized the dangers lurking below ground, and examines the infamous Bernhard Goetz shooting that made the subway a symbol of urban malaise. More hopefully, he describes the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's station improvements and ambitious programs for Music Underground, Poetry-in-Transit, and Arts-in-Transit, as keys to the city's renewal.

Brooks probes the image of the subway in the work of such artistic and literary figures as Reginald Marsh, John Dos Passos, Hart Crane, Walker Evans, Tom Wolfe, Saul Bellow, Red Grooms, and Keith Haring. He uses the work of Isabel Bishop, Betty Smith, Minna Citron, and Donna Dennis to show how women have experienced the subway. And he shows how Langston Hughes, Ann Petry, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and LeRoi Jones have used the subway to explore the city's racial tensions.