A Reminder Of The Past

I passed by an artifact recently…somewhere between a fossil and nostalgia:

I would call it an abandoned token booth, but I’m revealing my generation by doing so. The NYC subway began in 1904 with paper tickets similar to those still used on some commuter railroads, and only in the 1920s introduced coin-operated turnstiles. The coins were regular coins when the fare was 5 and then 10 cents, but that had to change when the fare was raised to 15 cents in 1953. That’s when the subway developed its own currency: the brass token. My earliest subway memories include the dime-sized tokens, my earliest commuting (starting with 7th grade) used the quarter-sized Y-cutout tokens, and I used at some point every style that was ever made.

So the subway began with ticket-sales booths, and those transitioned to selling tokens in the 1950s. It would seem like there was not much need for the booths during the three decades that the turnstiles used nickels and dimes, but they don’t seem to have been abandoned (see below)…maybe they were used to make change for people who didn’t happen to have the correct coin with them? The front of the old booths had metal grilles at the windows (again, similar to railroad ticket windows); here’s the restored and now-unused ticket booth at the 1905 Wall Street station on the 4/5:

After some violent attacks on token sellers in the late 1960s, the MTA introduced “bulletproof” glass and metal boxes in 1970:

MetroCard, a plastic temporary credit card system, was introduced in 1994 and after a very long overlap, tokens went away in 2003. OMNY, a tap-to-pay system using people’s regular credit cards or phones, or temporary tickets (yes, we’ve come full-circle) started in 2021 and is now the only way to buy new rides; existing MetroCards can be used until the end of this year. Since the card systems are amenable to automated sales from vending machines, and OMNY doesn’t necessarily need to sell anything separate at all (if people use their credit cards or phones) the number of token clerks started being reduced in the 1990s and as of two years ago is zero: there are station personnel, but they’re not sitting in boxes when they interact with riders.

Back to my picture at the top: that’s the 1932 50th Street station on the C and E trains. So it was built in the regular-coin era, but it was built with a “token booth.” The more I think about it, information and making change seems like a good bet for its use at that time. The actual “booth” is a room behind the tiled wall, the rectangle on the right was the door for staff to get to that room, and the projecting bay probably looked similar to the Wall Street projecting bay. Maybe not so pretty.