In the year
2000, New York's subway system will celebrate its centennial. The place
to go to see how the world's most famous underground railway got its start
and evolved into a system that carries 3.5 million passengers a day is
the New York Transit Museum in Brooklyn. Our guide for the day was Matthew
Brennesholtz, who's been riding New York subways since childhood.
The Transit
Museum is housed appropriately in a real 1930s subway station that's no
longer in use. Annie Hairston welcomed us from the reception desk that
used to be the token booth. She told us the museum was founded twenty
years ago and just recently came under the aegis of the Metropolitan Transit
Authority. The new connection will give the museum more support, she said.
On the first
level is a display of turnstiles dating back to the subway's youth and
a new display called "Steel, Stone and Backbone," which shows
how the network was built by 30,000 workers drawn from New York's immigrant
communities.
We descended
to the lower level, where the evolution of subway cars is illustrated
with examples from every decade. Early cars with incandescent lighting
and wicker upholstery gave way to units with molded plastic seats and
'germicidal lighting' in the sixties. The lights, which were supposed
to sterilize the unhealthy air in the tunnels, were removed when it was
learned that overexposure to the light itself was a health hazard.
The museum
also has trolleys, buses, and displays of tickets and tokens. The gift
shop sells jewely made of subway artifacts along with books, t-shirts
and mementos for train lovers. We talked to Crystal Abney, the museum's
property protection agent, before we left. One of her more challenging
tasks is to make sure souvenir hounds get their memorabilia from the gift
shop, and not from the trains themselves.
We left the
museum through a turnstile used in the 1930s and emerged into a sunny
day in Brooklyn with new appreciation for New York's underground wonder.
New
York Transit Museum
Mailing address: 130 Livingston Street, 9th Floor, Box E
Brooklyn, New York
(718) 243-8601
Visit the
MTA's Web site at http://www.mta.nyc.ny.us
