I really intended to post this when it was the correct week (I don’t remember the day)…four weeks ago…but in any case last month marks the 50th anniversary of me starting to commute by subway, in 7th grade. At first it was simply the 7 train to Grand Central for school in east Midtown; the following year, it was the 7 to Grand Central, change to the 6, and head to the Upper East Side.
To put 50 years of commuting (and now, when I walk to work, travel for work) by subway into perspective, the IRT subway opened for business in 1904. So I’ve been commuting on the subways for 41% of their existence. If we go back to the first elevated train – the Ninth Avenue el in 1870 – I’ve been using NYC heavy-rail mass transit for 32% of its existence, which is still, if you ask me, pretty good.
The subways have been generally improving for most of the 50 years. In fact, 1976, when I started, was arguably just about the worst moment for the system. Deferred maintenance had caught up with the tracks, the signals, and the rolling stock; with a handful of exceptions, stations hadn’t been renovated; and there were legitimate safety concerns, which were then greatly exaggerated in movies like Death Wish and The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3. To give a sense of things then…
Fluorescent strip lighting had been installed along the platform edge of some, but not all, stations, but the back of the platforms and the mezzanines were mostly still lit by widely-spaced incandescent bulbs. Here’s a picture from 1978 or so, when the Historic American Engineering Record was photographing pieces of the original IRT:
Those electric clocks over the platform were, in my experience, wrong more often than they were right. Note the bulbs at about 10-foot spacing in the waiting area.
In 1976, the 7 train had relatively new rolling stock – R33S – bought specifically for the 1964-65 World’s Fair and painted in very un-subway-like white and light blue. It is surprisingly hard to find a good picture of them from then, as most of the pictures on line are preserved individual cars from the Transit Museum, cleaned up for the annual Nostalgia Train runs. Here’s a Nostalgia Train in 2008, with eight different styles of old car. The lead car is one of the World’s Fair R33Ss.
Here are museum pictures of the interior of one of those cars. A general view, with the old-fashioned straps – “straphanger” began as a literal description – the big ceiling fans, and the operable vent windows at the top of the main windows:
The pre-computer destination sign….the circle-with-a-cross below the right end of each of the three lines were knobs, turned by removable handles that the conductors carried on their belts, that were spun at the end of the line to reverse the TO and FROM lines.
Finally, entrance was via tokens, which were brass coins minted by the subway system. When I was a little kid, they were about the size of a dime, called “Small Y Tokens” at the last link above. From 7th to 10th grade, they were the size of a quarter, the “Large Y Tokens.” There were two quarter-sized variations after that, up to 1985 (when I was a junior in college). Then the bullseye tokens up to 1995, looking vaguely like a Canadian toonie or a 2-Euro coin. I almost never used the quarter-sized pentagram token after 1995 because it was in use after the Metrocard was introduced, and I was happy to shed the weight of tokens.
You must be logged in to post a comment.