Photographer and master printer Brian Young first arrived in New York City in 1984. He witnessed all the well-known ills of '70s and early '80s New York, finding the city slowly, haltingly recovering from an economic depression. Industry and manufacturing jobs had left the city, and the population continued to drain out to the suburbs. The "crack epidemic" was on the front pages and on the streets. Abandoned shells of burnt-out cars littered the roads and muggings were simply a fact of daily life.

Young found his camera increasingly drawn to the subway system--one of the great social levelers of life in New York City and, increasingly, the canvas for an explosive profusion of graffiti. Brian Young: The Train NYC 1984 collects the photographer's quiet, black-and-white shots of the subway from 1984, bringing a vanished New York evocatively back to life.