The one place where New York City is still 361-years-old

As we’ve previously discussed at The Groove, 2025 is New York City’s 400th anniversary. Maybe. I mean officially, yes, it’s the city’s 400th birthday, if you want to listen to “the mayor” or anti-British former City Council President Paul O’Dwyer. But it turns out that there’s still one place you can go in New York City where the city’s official age is 361 years old, though you would never know it unless you looked. 

That place? The New York City subway, and no I’m not talking about the Chambers Street J/M/Z stop. Instead I’m talking about the R46 subway trains, where if you take a close look at the fading wallpaper, you can see the old pre-1977 city seal that puts the establishment of the city in the year 1664. 

As you may remember from my January blog about the city’s possible 400th anniversary, there’s a certain amount of controversy over the city’s founding year. For a long time, people settled on 1664, which is when the hated English sailed into New York Harbor and Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant handed the place over to them, no questions asked. But in 1977, O’Dwyer succeeded in his campaign to get the city seal to recognize 1625, the year Dutch colonists settled in Manhattan, as the year New York City became New York City. Even though the year before that, the Dutch had settled on Governors Island. You can see where it gets confusing.

If you’re lucky enough to live on the Q train like I am, or anywhere else served by the N, W, Rockaway Shuttle or the G train, you too can take a step back in time whenever you commute, provided you know what to look for and that you don’t mind squinting. If your train car has good enough lighting (which is one of many things these trains don’t have compared to the good new subway cars, which are good) you can see that on the old yellow wallpaper there are two seals. One is the New York State seal and the other is the New York City seal. But driving home just how fucking old some of our subway cars are, the New York City seal still has 1664 written on the bottom ribbon.

This particular anomaly has nothing to do with an ancient New York State vs. New York City policy fight that was passive-aggressively memorialized forever by a state agency refusing to recognize a new city seal. Instead, it’s a much more normal failure we find in the city, that failure of doing anything about our aging infrastructure. See, if you happen to step onto a train with the state and city seal wallpaper, it means you’re on an R46, a train that was introduced to the subway anytime between 1975 and 1978, too late to change the wallpaper with the old seal. 

Even back in 1981, when nobody thought there was a future for cities, the MTA thought that the R46 would be retired by 2011. Instead, everyone in charge of the state forgot about a key lesson that they taught me while I worked the shelves at Trader Joe’s: always work with a sense of urgency. As a result, no one even ordered new trains to replace the R46s until 2018, which you may remember as a time when “troubled” was the most common descriptor of the subway system. The lack of urgency again came back to bite the MTA in the ass because pandemic-related supply chain issues further delayed the delivery of the new rolling stock to replace the old trains. 

At this point, the last of the R46 trains will be over 50 years old by the time their replacements are supposed to start showing up in 2027, which gives you at least a couple more years to luxuriate in the era when the official position of the government of the city of New York was that the city was founded in 1664. These are very old trains, older than even Tim who is the oldest person at The New York Groove. 

How old are these trains? So old that they’re featured in the beginning of Susan Seidelman’s punk rock shaggy dog movie Smithereens, itself a precursor to Seidelman’s Desperately Seeking Susan which came out in 1985. The trains are so old that the last one was delivered to New York City Transit in 1978, the same year that the Sex Pistols (which some version of is headlining this year’s CBGB Festival, a thing you can buy a $299 ticket to) broke up. In some ways, yes, it’s a minor miracle that you can ride the same exact trains that your punk forebears rode, and yes some people will probably try to convince you the trains are even more dangerous than the days when those fashionable heroin addicts were riding the rails. 

Sometimes of course, this kind of subway archaeology is fun, like the person who found an ancient ad for Three Kings deep inside a layer of ads on a station billboard. But I personally do not find this specific subway archaeology to be “fun” because unlike Three Kings, you can argue that there have been no lessons learned by anybody throughout this saga. Also unlike Three Kings, Spike Jonze is not here.

See, years of not taking investments in transit seriously have resulted in a kind of desperate sprint for the MTA in which the agency is trying to not only replace subway cars that were new before I was born, but also to replace a batch of cars that it first put into service in the 1980s that remain on the tracks because MTA maintenance employees work miracles. In the middle of said sprint, Kathy Hochul’s short-term decision to “pause” congestion pricing meant no one could talk about ways to fund the MTA’s 2025-2029 capital plan. That plan is supposed to be the one the MTA uses to replace the trains from the 80s, but it was not officially funded (kind of) until this month, which means the capital plan won’t actually get moving until halfway through the year when it was supposed to start.

This blog was supposed to be a goofy little thing about something I noticed on the train when I was high. Instead it was a tour through the riches of my Emersonian mind when I think about all the problems we have, especially with the trains and with the short-term decision making our elected officials are wedded to at all times. The blog is now also over. Goodbye!