MacGougan at Large

Notes from NYC - 2

Stand Clear

The New York subway system is a remarkable thing. While you can pay your way in with a smartphone today, the look and feel of the system is very similar to what I remember from my first time there, which was back in the 1970s.

One particular quirk that has remained unchanged for many years is a recording that plays whenever the train doors are closing. “Stand clear of the closing doors, please.” That exact recording - same voice, same intonation, everything - has apparently been playing on every train at every stop every day for decades. It struck me at first because the voice doesn’t sound like a New York voice. It’s a man’s voice and the accent struck me as vaguely Midwestern. Also, the voice has a very non-sibilant S.

Who is this guy? This is the sort of question that used to be unanswerable but now can be easily Googled. He’s Charlie Pellett, a Bloomberg Radio announcer. He is, in fact, a long-time New York City resident, but was born in the UK. As a boy, he was determined to lose his British accent, and did so by copying the voices he heard on the radio. So he grew up to have a radio announcer accent (which can be easily mistaken for Midwestern) and was well-positioned to find work as a radio announcer and moonlight as a subway announcer.

Charlie claims to be pleased and proud to be the voice of subway door closings, but you have to wonder if some small part of him wishes that his agent had been able to negotiate residuals. If he got a penny every time that recording played, he’d be richer than Musk, Bezos, and Gates put together.