When people think of New York City in the 1970s and ’80s, they think of seedy Times Square peep shows, crack vials in the street, burned out buildings and muggings in the subway. Willy Spiller thought it would be a great place to move. “Back then, the call of New York was tremendous,” says Spiller, a photographer who grew up in a part of the Swiss countryside so sparsely populated that my Google Maps refuses to find it. But by the age of 30 — after getting hooked on photography in college, working at a well-regarded Zurich newspaper, living in cities like Milan and traveling to Africa and Asia — Spiller yearned to experience the Big Apple’s world-renown arts and culture scene, particularly the music and fashion he heard so much about. In 1977, he landed in New York and, fittingly, stayed at the legendary artist outpost the Chelsea Hotel. 

“From there, I took my first expeditions,” Spiller says, describing his trips around the city so dramatically because, yes, he was warned about the dangers of New York ahead of time — apocryphally so. “Somebody said, ‘Watch out. Because of the skyscrapers, it’s so dark in the street, even during the day you have to walk with a flashlight.’”

Now, a third edition of the Spiller subway photo collection, which has retained the Hell on Wheels title, is available from Bildhalle, a gallery for photography that boasts locations in Zurich and Amsterdam. The newest Hell on Wheels — with a limited edition of 150 copies that includes a print for 250 Swiss francs (around $288), as well as signed and unsigned copies for sale — also contains a forward by the writer, former Life magazine editor-in-chief and photography lover Bill Shapiro. 

A mutual associate connected Shapiro to Spiller with hopes that Shapiro would pen the book’s forward. The request was perfectly timed. “I had recently moved to New Mexico after 35 years in Brooklyn riding the fucking F train,” Shapiro says. “It was great for me to think back on all of the good and bad of my subway years.”

White went on to observe that the more unsettled version of the city from 40 or 50 years ago “was also more democratic: a place and a time in which, rich or poor, you were stuck together in the misery (and the freedom) of the place, where not even money could insulate you.” Today’s New York is, of course, safer, and “more burnished and efficient,” White wrote, but also “cornerless and predictable” — the type of city that, as filmmaker John Waters noted to White, nobody would want to write a book about.

Hell on Wheels shows people of all colors, shapes, sizes and savings accounts on the subway, as seen through the eye of an adventurous outsider, bouncing off each other, while (mostly) sparing us the muggings. I don’t see my review copy leaving the top of my coffee table anytime soon.