PICKING EVERY FIGHT IN MIRROR’S EDGE
PART III
Authoritarian regimes often pick train stations as the place to present an idealized face to the world—a sort of dictator’s Instagram account. A station in a capital city is a point of entrance, a shiny front door to a society. It’s a confined space where message can be easily controlled.
No expense was spared on Moscow’s famous metro system, with enough marble and chandeliers to suggest an underground ballroom. At the height of the Soviet Union, photographs of Stalin were hung from its walls.
The street facade of the central station in Pyongyang, meanwhile, has the appearance of a shrine—thanks to the portraits of the two Kim Jongs at the foot of its clocktower. On their flanks, a long colonnade props up a row of letters, “Long live the Great Leader Comrade Kim Jong-un! Long live the glorious Workers’ Party of Korea!”
There’s nothing so audacious in Ryding Park, a subway station far beneath the rooftops of The City in . There’s an intimidating order to its symmetry, yes—and a patterned configuration of thin bulbs in the roof offers strange light, like that
