This one’s been making the rounds lately. I enjoyed this glimpse back into New York City Subway history, and I always appreciate a cameo of the K train, the original route to use the Chrystie St. cut. It will make for a fun ten minutes of nostalgia on a Friday morning.
If you want to know the technical details, the filmmaker offered up an explanation on the YouTube page:
The story: in 1986 I made a round trip through the USA and Canada. The starting point was New York. So I filmed some scenes in Manhattan. And was going in the underground at 43nd St & Times Square. I filmed with a big ARRIflex 16mm camera with a 120m magazine with 7250 Kodak 16mm color reversal Tungsten 400 ASA film and a Schneider Cine Xenon 1:2/16mm lens. This equipment is good for 10 Minutes recording duration at 25 f/sec.
After I time a man comes to me and said, he’s a cameraman at ABC and filming at the subway is strictly forbidden without any permission and police is on the other end of the platform. So I was leaving the station, but I had these beautiful pics of the old times in the New York subway. At the same time I recorded the stereo sound with a SONY WM-D6C with two Sennheiser micros in stereo.
In 1986 I edited the pics to the song of the band “London Beat” — “9am at a New York subway”. About 25 years later I was uploading this movie to YouTube. But SONY Music was locking my movie because of the copyright of the song. So I deleted the audio track und was uploading the silence version. After the great response to this video of the New York subway of 1986 now I opened my archive once again with the original film and composed it with the original stereo sound to this over 10 minutes long “directors cut” of all scenes, I filmed at this day in June 1986.
Enjoy.
14 comments
Nostalgia? Speak for yourself…
Looking at the clip brings back bad memories of an unclean and unsafe subway system – I for one don’t yearn for the ugliness of the graffiti adorned cars…. see for example minute 5:50 to 6:05 of the video to get an idea of what I do not miss.
We’ve come a long way in the last quarter-century. Open windows on (assumed) hot cars, graffiti everywhere… Though I notice the PA announcements at the 1:00 and 5:00 marks are quite clear.
I do like the old typefaces on some of the signs though, and I like that blue stripe along the length of some of the older trains.
The blue stripe is actually on what in 1986, were some of the newest trains (built 1972-1976), the now-retired R44 fleet; their identical cousins, the R46, still run.
The shots of the IRT trains on the Times Square platform are fascinating to see because the video was shot right at the outset of the Kiley-Gunn war on graffiti and the GOH on the R-26/R-36 cars. So we get mostly some horrific looking R-17/R-21/R-22 cars passing through the station — the culmination of 15 years of failure to win the graffiti wars and 20 years of TA and MTA failure to do serious preventive maintenance, until that graffiti-free and fully rehabbed train of R-29 ‘birds comes rolling in near the end of the video on the No. 2 train, providing a glimmer of hope.
(The pre-GOH R-32s on the Eighth Ave. local also are fun to contrast and compare, at a time when the same cars on roughly the same route are now really approaching the end of their lives. And while the R-44s on the A are by far the best overall looking non-rehabbed cars in the video, the two ‘dark cars’ that come rolling through early on provide another blast from the past on how bad ongoing maintenance had gotten on the system before the mid-80s.)
Couldn’t help but noticing that the train announcements were somehow much easier to hear back then…
Ah the good old days! I was only 12 and was fascinated by the subway. Still am today.
I was 7 in 1986 and I remember seeing the subway like this back then. It was fascinating to see what what happening since the subway was in a state of transition from grafftied cars to new clean ones. My mom and I lived by the 1 train that year and that line was getting the current R62A subway cars that are on there now and that was just so cool to see the subway transform before my eyes like that as a kid. I’m into my 30’s now and I’m just as facinated by the subway now as I was then.
Wrong K Train – the K through the Chrystie St cut was discontinued in the 1970s and it ran up the 6th Ave line, not the 8th Ave.
In 1979 when the TA decided to replace all double letter designations with single letters, it decided to reuse K and rechristen the AA train as the K train. That’s the K you see here. 8th Ave local from 168th St to Chambers St.
Oh, I know. This K was basically duplicating the C line, but the K itself had its origins in the Chrystie St. Cut before the MTA scaled back that service in 1976. I’ve written about it extensively.
It’s neat/weird to see the underpass from uptown/downtown platforms at 42nd Street before they were closed up. I’m guessing this was filmed after the lower level closed to revenue service but that passageway was still open for the transfer.
Notice how empty some of the trains were compared with today.
Stairs to the lower level of 42nd Street seen at the beginning?
plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose…those stations that have so far escaped the MTA’s rehabilitation program remain as forbidding and grimy as ever. West Fourth Street Station and West 14th Street on the 12 and 3 lines come to mind. What will it take for the MTA to bring its stations up to some kind of minimum standard (as it has admirably done with the rolling-stock).
I’ll take it, as is! All those slim, in-shape bodies. Where were the filmmakers hiding the fat people?
Yeah, I’d much rather look at dirt and graffiti than to have my eyes repeatedly assaulted by the surplus and excess avoidupois heaped in mounds, folded into layers, rippling and jiggling on the grossly obese bodies that now populate our cleaner trains.