The first official passenger on the New York subway was the mayor, George McClellan, on 27 October 1904. He was supposed to drive the ceremonial first train a short distance and hand over to a professional motorman. He enjoyed it so much he refused to give up the controls and drove the whole way from City Hall to 103rd Street.
By midnight that day more than 100,000 people had ridden it. The system has essentially never stopped since.
Before the tunnels
Nineteenth-century New York moved by horse. By the 1860s Broadway was so congested that crossing it was genuinely dangerous, and the elevated railways built from the 1870s — steam locomotives on iron viaducts over Second, Third, Sixth and Ninth Avenues — solved the traffic problem by creating a new one. They dropped hot ash and oil on the street, they were deafening, and they made the avenues beneath them permanently dark. Property values on elevated streets collapsed.
An underground line had been proposed repeatedly and blocked repeatedly, largely by Tammany Hall interests with money in the street railways. Alfred Ely Beach built a secret 300-foot pneumatic demonstration tube under Broadway in 1870, propelling a single car with a giant fan, and it worked, and it went nowhere politically.
The blizzard of 1888, which buried the city, brought down every telegraph wire and stopped all surface transport for days, changed the argument. Within a decade the city had committed to building underground.
Three systems, not one
The city paid for the tunnels and leased them to private operators, which is why the modern map looks the way it does.
The IRT — Interborough Rapid Transit — opened the first line in 1904, from City Hall up the east side, across 42nd Street and up Broadway. Its tunnels were built to a narrower loading gauge. Those are today’s numbered lines, and their trains are still narrower than the rest.
The BRT, later the BMT, built out of Brooklyn with a wider gauge.
The IND — Independent Subway System — was built and operated by the city itself from 1932, explicitly to compete with the two private companies and eventually replace them.
The three were unified under city control in 1940, but the tunnels were never made compatible. BMT and IND trains can run on each other’s tracks; IRT trains cannot run on either. That is why the lettered and numbered lines are effectively two railways sharing a map, and why the transfers between them are all at street or mezzanine level.
The private companies had been trapped by their franchise agreements at a five-cent fare, fixed since 1904 and unchanged through decades of inflation. Both were bankrupt or close to it by unification. The fare finally rose to a dime in 1948.
The bad years
The system was neglected through the 1950s and 60s and collapsed in the 1970s. The city’s near-bankruptcy in 1975 cut maintenance to almost nothing. Trains broke down constantly — the mean distance between failures fell to around 7,000 miles. Every carriage was covered inside and out in graffiti. Track fires, derailments and crime were routine, and ridership fell to its lowest level since 1917.
The recovery took twenty years and a great deal of money. The MTA’s capital programme from 1982 onward rebuilt track, replaced the fleet, and adopted a policy that no train would run in service with graffiti on it — cars were pulled and cleaned every time, which broke the cycle by 1989. Ridership recovered through the 1990s and eventually passed the levels of the 1940s.
What is remarkable about it
It runs 24 hours a day, which almost no other major system in the world does. That is possible because most of the trunk lines have four tracks — two local, two express — so maintenance can be done on one pair while the other runs. It is also why weekend service is so heavily disrupted.
472 stations, more than any other system anywhere.
Almost 40 per cent of it is above ground, on viaducts and embankments in the outer boroughs, which surprises people who assume it is all tunnel.
Recent history
The Second Avenue Subway was first proposed in 1929. Construction started and stopped in the 1970s, leaving abandoned tunnel segments under the east side. The first three stations finally opened on 1 January 2017, eighty-eight years after the plan, and the extension north into Harlem is under way.
The 7 train extension to Hudson Yards opened in 2015, the first new station in Manhattan in twenty-five years.
Hurricane Sandy in 2012 flooded nine tunnels under the East River with salt water, and the repair work — particularly the Canarsie Tunnel carrying the L train — took a decade and a great deal of argument.
OMNY, contactless fare payment, replaced the MetroCard completely at the end of 2025, thirty-two years after the MetroCard replaced the token.
The bits you can still see
City Hall station, the showpiece of the 1904 line with Guastavino tile vaults and skylights, closed in 1945 because its curved platform could not take longer trains. You can see it from a 6 train that stays on board past the last stop at Brooklyn Bridge — it loops through the old station to turn around, and nobody stops you looking.
The old IRT control house at 72nd Street and Broadway is still standing in the middle of the road.
The New York Transit Museum in Brooklyn Heights is in a decommissioned 1936 station and has a platform full of vintage cars you can walk through. It is one of the best museums in the city and hardly any visitor goes.