By the time she arrives at Brooklyn Technical High School in Fort Greene, two hours have passed since she walked out her door. So when asked about the transit concerns of Dante de Blasio — a classmate who, after his father’s election as mayor on Tuesday, may have to move from Park Slope, Brooklyn, to Gracie Mansion on the Upper East Side — Nowshen appeared unsympathetic.
“That’s nothing special,” she said, adding, “So what if it takes an hour?”
Bill de Blasio, the mayor-elect of New York City, said this week that his family had not yet decided whether to move from its modest townhouse to the stately comforts of the mayoral residence. But he did acknowledge a chief impediment: The travel time to Dante’s specialized public school, now a short drive away, could more than double from the transit-poor badlands of East End Avenue.
For a family billed as a relatable alternative to the gilded reign of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg — Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat, has often trumpeted the significance of electing a mayor with a child in public school — the potential move would place Dante, 16, in the company of tens of thousands of New York students whose slogs to class each morning are less than ideal.
At Dante’s school alone, nearly 2,200 students — about 40 percent of those enrolled — commute from another borough, an assistant principal said.
On Thursday, Dante’s peers at the city’s elite public schools suggested that there were worse fates than a morning on the train. They described the chance to complete last-minute work and to devour a quick breakfast, the appeal of people-watching underground and the independence of a parent-free trip.
“He’s more like other New York City students,” said Danielle Tong, 15, a sophomore at Bronx High School of Science, “if he makes that long commute.”
Semon Basar, 17, a senior at Bronx Science, said the school was only 15 minutes from her home in Pelham Bay, in the Bronx, by car. But because she does not “have the luxury of getting dropped off,” she said, she must spend over an hour on the train in each direction, riding the No. 6 into Manhattan every morning, then transferring to the No. 4 to return to the Bronx.
While she described Dante as “a star,” Semon expressed little compassion for his potentially lengthened commute, which might be partly or wholly experienced from the back of a chauffeured S.U.V.
“If it’s a problem commuting,” she suggested, then the mayor-to-be “should fix that up for every student.”
In fact, generations of New York families have confronted a version of Dante’s plight: craving a larger space — whether in a more remote corner of the city or even outside of it — and potentially spurning the transit access that might have accompanied a smaller home.
Alex Gaviria, 14, a freshman at Brooklyn Tech who commutes over an hour from Queens on the No. 7 and G trains, said the appeal of Dante’s possible new home should trump any travel concerns. “Come on, it’s the mayor’s mansion!” he said. “Why would you want to pass that up?”
Others offered a series of suggestions for a student unaccustomed to a subway commute.
“You can do homework and sleep,” said Sam Fishman, 16, a junior at Bronx Science.
“Check out girls,” added Faiaz Sharar, 14, a freshman at Brooklyn Tech.
“I would probably say cut his hair,” said Jordan Page, a classmate of Dante’s, “so that people don’t notice him.”
Previously, Mr. de Blasio, now the public advocate, often drove Dante to Brooklyn Tech in the morning — about a 10-minute trip. In a campaign video released in June, Mr. de Blasio appeared disinclined to relinquish the role of chauffeur. “My staff understands that that’s something I try to keep sacred,” he said of the father-son drives.
With cooperative traffic flow on the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive, the trip from Gracie Mansion to Brooklyn Tech might take only 20 minutes or so. But morning gridlock would most likely inflate that figure. A ride on the subway would require a nearly mile-long walk to Lexington Avenue, then about 25 minutes on the No. 4 or No. 5 train, followed by a short walk from Nevins Street or Atlantic Avenue.
“I sympathize with him,” Gene Russianoff, the staff lawyer for the Straphangers Campaign, said of Dante’s potential transportation downgrade. “He’s trading a straight-shot commute.”
Dante could benefit from a partial subway commute, à la Mr. Bloomberg, who has been known to take the subway after being driven from his Upper East Side home to an express stop 22 blocks away. Perhaps the teenager could hitch a ride to Lexington Avenue, or to a stop near City Hall, before going underground.
Brendan Jacotin, 17, a senior who travels to Brooklyn Tech from Canarsie, Brooklyn, proposed another remedy: a skateboard. He said he used one to improve a 15-minute walk to the nearest subway stop each day.
In fact, history suggests that extended commutes have a way of building character. As a teenager in East Elmhurst, Queens, Eric H. Holder Jr., now the United States attorney general, traveled an hour and a half to Stuyvesant High School.
Justice Antonin Scalia of the United States Supreme Court, who took part in a junior military training program at Xavier High School, has spoken wistfully of the days when he would “travel on the subway from Queens to Manhattan with a rifle.”
And in “Dreams From My Father,” President Obama — who, upon meeting Dante at a fund-raiser in September, remarked, “My Afro was never that good” — wrote of the “impassable” divide a man reached when he decided, among other things, to begin taking cabs at night “to avoid the subways.” (Mr. Obama, who studied at Columbia University, later moved to Park Slope.)
So the future president, “like a tourist,” spent a year “walking from one end of Manhattan to the other,” he wrote, absorbing the “range of human possibility on display, trying to trace out my future in the lives of the people I saw, looking for some opening through which I could re-enter.”
Such enlightenment could be Dante’s with just a four-and-a-half-hour stroll each day.
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