Subway use has plummeted in recent weeks, but in poorer areas of New York City, many people are still riding.

By Christina Goldbaum and Lindsey Rogers Cook

As the coronavirus pandemic has all but shut down New York City, its subway — an emblem of urban overcrowding — has become almost unrecognizable. Before the crisis erupted, more than five million people squeezed onto the system everyday.

Today, it carries fewer than 1 million, lower than the number of people who traveled on the opening weekend of the system in 1904.

But even as officials crack down on New York’s ability to gather, removing hoops from basketball courts and sending the police to break up large crowds, in poorer corners of the city subway stations are still bustling, as if almost nothing had changed.

In the Bronx, two stations that have had relatively low drops in ridership serve neighborhoods with some of the highest poverty rates in the city, a Times analysis found.

The 170th Street station in the University Heights neighborhood and Burnside station in the Mount Eden area are surrounded by large Latin American and African immigrant communities where the median household income is about $22,000 — one-third the median household income in New York State, according to census data.

It is a striking change on a system that has long been the great equalizer among New Yorkers, a space where hourly workers jostled alongside financial executives. Now the subway is closer to being a symbol of the city’s inequality, amplifying the divide between those with the means to safely shelter at home and those who must continuing braving public transit to preserve their meager livelihoods.

Many residents say they have no choice but to pile onto trains with strangers, potentially exposing themselves to the virus. Even worse, a reduction in service in response to plunging ridership has led, at times, to crowded conditions, making it impossible to maintain the social distancing that public health experts recommend.

“This virus is very dangerous. I don’t want to get sick, I don’t want my family to get sick, but I still need to get to my job,” said Yolanda Encanción, a home health aide who works in Lower Manhattan.

As she waited for a train at the 170th Street station, Ms. Encanción stretched a medical mask across her face and slipped her hands into latex gloves. The possibility of being exposed to the coronavirus on the subway is just part of the simmering anxiety that hangs like a backdrop to her everyday life now.

Her two teenage children are desperate to see their friends outside, but she only allows them to leave the family’s two-bedroom apartment for a walk with their aunt once a day.

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