7 ways to celebrate the subway's 120th birthday

The subway is a vital lifeline for the vast majority of New Yorkers. The subway is going to turn 120 years old soon. The subway is where I got a married woman’s phone number one time. The subway is the reason you can live here without paying for car insurance and gas and whatever else that thing costs you. The subway is where you get your reading done.

Okay this lede is getting a bit away from me, but that’s because I, and possibly even you, can go on forever with the sentence construction “The subway is.” And just as the subway is a beleaguered and betrayed institution at the moment, the New York Transit Museum has even put together a whole exhibit around the sentence called “The Subway Is…” to celebrate the city’s mass transit system as a feat of engineering, uniquely New York City melting pot and the reason the five boroughs make up the city as we know it. As the subway is 

The new exhibit opens today, giving you the chance to see how the Transit Museum finishes the sentence. Curator Jodi Shapiro told The Groove she’s particularly excited about the exhibit’s focus on some in-depth stories of the engineering feats that built the subway and the people who accomplished those feats. 

“What is the subway?” Shapiro asked. “It's so many things to so many people. So we chose a couple of ways to answer that question. This exhibit has some specifics about the people that built the subway, the design elements that are in it, the engineering challenges that the chief engineer and his crew faced.”

Among the stories the exhibit will highlight are the stories of E.F. Soule Jr. and Burdett Kipp, two engineers whose names frequently appear in the Transit Museum’s archives of material from the early days of the subway’s construction. Along with showing off each man’s employee badge, the exhibit will delve into Soule and Kipp’s lives as they worked to build the railroad in the early 1900s.

“Both of them started out doing things that are physical labor. E.F Soule was a rod man who was a surveyor's assistant, the guy who holds the leveling rod," Shapiro said. "Then he gets promoted to assistant engineer, which demonstrates, in a subtle way, that transit has always been a way where you can come into the workforce at the lowest level and there's opportunities for you to advance and that was built into the labor force starting in 1900. It's cool, I love objects and things in our collection that allow us to tell a multi-layered story.”

The Transit Museum is also hauling out watercolors, etchings, oil paintings and pastels from its collection of subway-inspired fine art (bet you didn’t know they had a fine art collection) for a piece of the exhibit called “The Subway is Inspiring." Shapiro said this became part of the show in order to show off some cool stuff people didn’t know the museum had.

Ultimately, as the system hurtles towards its 120th birthday on Oct. 27, Shapiro said that the message the exhibit is trying to drive home is that New York as we know it was built by the subway. Would Queens still be farmland if the Independent Subway System and Interborough Rapid Transit Company didn’t build the Flushing line and the Queens Boulevard line? Well who can say really, but that's how it happened and the physical landscape of New York City changed forever.

“The reason why there are so many completions of the sentence ‘The subway is,’ is because, if there were only one, it would be ‘The subway is New York.’ The city existed before the subway, but the city, in its modern expression, would not be what it is without the subway. The first subway line opens, and people suddenly realize, I don't have to live below 14th Street. I can't imagine, since I've lived in New York my entire life, and the subway has always been present,  what a monumental shift in thinking that must have been for so many people.”

Other ways to celebrate the subway's birthday

There are, of course, many ways to celebrate the subway besides going to the Transit Museum, and better ways than doing those awkward photo shoots when elected officials tweet their one annual subway ride to show they’re allegedly normal just like you. As if. You can pick fights about your favorite pieces of it or your favorite glimpse of it on the silver screen, take a self-guided subway art tour or even ride the subway for an entire day.

Embrace nostalgia
Maybe after you wander through the exhibit you'll have a desperate, clawing feeling of wanting to have an old-timey subway experience. Well, good news, the Transit Museum is hauling out its 197 Lo-V subway cars for four Nostalgia Rides, two each on Oct. 27 and Nov. 16.

A ticket to ride ($60 for adults) gets you the chance to travel along pieces of the original IRT route, including a departure from the shuttered Old South Ferry Station and a roll through the Old City Hall Station. Tammany Hall-style corruption is not included with price of admission (ho ho you get enough of that for yourself anyway).

Tell Governor Hochul to stop fucking up
You may understand that the subway was and is essential to building New York City as we know it, but you know who doesn’t get it? Governor Kathy Hochul, who is trying to kill congestion pricing, robbing the MTA of $15 billion for badly-needed transit improvements, at the same time that the MTA is trying to find a way to fund a new five-year capital plan focused on ensuring the system doesn’t rot away from the inside. So call and email the governor and tell her in no uncertain terms to bring back congestion pricing and to fully fund the MTA’s 2025-2029 capital plan.

Set a new record on the Subway Challenge
The Subway Challenge is simple to describe but extremely difficult to do: ride the subway, set foot in all 472 stations and if you want to be the new top dog in the challenge, do it all in 22 hours, 14 minutes and 9 seconds. 

Comedian Kate Jones currently holds the Guinness World Record for hitting every stop in the system in 22 hours, 14 minutes and 10 seconds in 2023, but no one has approached it since then. The good news for you is that there are many many more bathrooms in the system than when Jones accomplished the feat but you still need to stay awake for basically a full day and either bring plenty of snacks and water with you or have a good support team that’ll meet you along the way for power ups.

Argue about the best subway line
The best and only Hinge prompt I can remember from my days of dating app Hell was one that went “Pick the best one: A/C/E, 1/2/3, 4/5/6.” Now, the obvious answer is the A/C/E. No offense to the people of Pelham or Canarsie, but for starters, the A train has one of the best above-ground runs in the system between Howard Beach and Broad Channel as it feels like your train is gliding on Jamaica Bay itself. The sheer size of the A train, the longest line in the system, is also the example Jim Dwyer uses in his book Subway Lives to demonstrate just how difficult it would be to transition away from a system that runs 24 hours per day. 

Anyway, you can disagree (you’d be wrong) but I think that this kind of low-stakes meaningless argument can still be fun even in this age of screeching “debate me” types all over the internet. Ask your friends, ask someone you’re flirting with, ask a candidate for mayor who’s trying to shake your hand at a train station, no one should be safe from the question.

Argue about the best subway movie
Speaking of low-stakes meaningless arguments, you can also stake out your position on what the best subway movie is. Could it be The Taking of Pelham 123? Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.? Is it Money Train? Lol it is definitely not Money Train, whatever my Twitter mutual Bilge Ebiri might say about it over at Vulture. There’s always The Warriors, which I would definitely call a subway movie given not just its unreal subway bathroom brawl but also for the fact that it’s about desperately trying to get home on the train.

Take a subway art tour
Don’t forget that the subway itself is full of poetry and art, beautiful art. Using the Bloomberg Connects app, which provides curated guides to art around the world, you can find any piece of underground art that piques your interest.

Our own Jess Joseph recommends you stop by Reach New York, An Urban Musical Instrument at the 34th Street N/R platform, where by reaching up and putting your hand in front of a box suspended above the platform, someone standing further down the platform hears a blast of musical notes.

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