Video reveals NYC subway ride 108 years ago from Union Square to Grand Central | Hacker News Reader

Video reveals NYC subway ride 108 years ago from Union Square to Grand Central

nydailynews.com

119 pointsjamesbritt44 comments

As a (former) regular rider of the NYC subway, the thing that strikes me the most is just how short the platforms all are!

Anyone who's ever had to turn an MVP into something that can serve millions of requests will appreciate some of the history of the MTA. At almost every station along the old IRT lines, you can pick out the boundaries of the "old" stations and where the platforms were later extended. As the article mentions, this was also the reason for the closing of some of the stations. For example the 91st St. station was closed because 96th St. was extended exclusively to the south, adding a new entrance between 92nd and 93rd St. (not much sense in having two station entrances one block apart).

Another related fun bit of trivia... If you've ever wondered why some NYC subway lines have numbers and some have letters, the numbers are the old IRT lines while the letters are the old BMT/IND lines. Both sets of lines use the same gauge (width of the actual rails), but the BMT/IND lines had wider cars. Since the stations had to be built to the width of the cars and not the gauge of the track, even today you can't run the letters on the numbers or vice versa.

You can actually run the IRT cars on BMT/IND tracks, it would just be awkward for passengers. Maintenance trains (e.g. the garbage collector train, the trains used for trackwork, etc.) often use retired IRT cars for things like motive power or transporting equipment for that very reason: they can go on any line.

In this vein, one of the grandest bits of NYC train porn are pictures of Penn Station before they demolished it and built the soggy basement that is called Penn Station today: http://www.nypap.org/sites/default/files/penn_station.jpg

In a similar train of thought, Central Station was about to be demolished, too, and got saved literally the last minute:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Central_Terminal#Proposa...

Reminds me of this video: http://www.wimp.com/sanfrancisco/ -- uninterrupted San Francisco footage from 1905. Very surreal, extremely captivating.

And here's the same shot a few years later after the earthquake. Just devastating: http://archive.org/details/tmp_50168

Wow this is amazing.. they used to have emergent / "chaotic" traffic patterns back then in the west, the likes of which you only find in (much of) Asia, Africa or India these days.

And how agile, vivid and alert most everyone is in the streets! Quite remarkable -- truly people were a different breed back then, for better or worse.

Notice no traffic lights, stop signs! Also note the conspicuous absence of women in this video and also car steering wheels on the right! In fact, I'm surprised there are so many cars on the road in 1905!

There are women in the video, although not as many as there are men. For example, you can see two women at the 35 second mark at the right side of the screen, and another near the left side of the screen at the 1:35 mark. There are more, but these are just two that show them clearly in the foreground.

Good to know that driving on the road was a bloodsport in SF even a hundred years ago.

Anyone know what the music in this video is?

The track is called La Femme d'Argent by the band Air on the album Moon Safari. What's odd is I had just been listening to this earlier and somehow thought something had turned it back on.

Surreal indeed.

The subway video looked remarkably similar to what you would see today. Folks were overdressed, but that's about it.

However, that San Francisco street cruise was a different world!

Wow. I'm not sure if people just hung out in the middle of the street back then or if folks are just excited about the camera.

Reminds me more of the London tube stations than any of the NYC subway stations of today, likely due to a combination of respect and lack of bodily waste/trash.

I ride the NYC subway every day and am always surprised at how poorly the stations are treated. People throw wrappers on the tracks so calmly and confidently as if they were designated to collect waste. Puddles of urine are not uncommonly found. It baffles me. I don't know where that attitude comes from.

New York in general is just dirty. It's a place to visit, not to live in.

Reality is dirty. I love it here in NYC.

No, reality in NYC is dirty. The rest of the country isn't. It's always amazed me how New Yorkers think their city of 8 million defines a country of 330 million.

It doesn't at all define america, but the rest of the country is literally built on dirt. May as well embrace it. Maybe it's because I grew up in the country but living on a garbage pile doesn't really phase me after poking at animal carcasses in my childhood.

There's a whole lot of difference between soil and trash, even if both can also be referred to as "dirt".

In Buenos Aires (Argentina) we used the same wood railcars for 99 years in the first subway line of the city "Subte A". We changed all of them this January and the last day was a big event.

Some trains in use: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ot1Lzgiy13s

Professional edited video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEoFmGMkRlY

Inside the train in the last travel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9L_G6WTL2nQ

What really struck me was the lack of those those safety bumps and lights on the ground near the edge of the platform. It's such a basic part of what I think of as a subway platform but clearly took a while before they showed up.

No yellow safety line! The madness of it all

You know what strikes me most about that video? The tunnels and supports are so clean! Very cool.

The subway was only months old at the time.

Is that some sort of lighting rig on a parallel track? Is there any more information about how this film was made? Seems like a pretty big achievement for the time.

It looks like it was shot from another train that was following the pictured one. There may have been additional lighting, but the train could have just been illuminated by the headlights of the train behind it.

There is a third train running parallel to the train that is ahead of the camera train, throughout the entire trip. It almost looks like it has an array of fluorescent tubes or mercury vapor lamps.

Sometimes the train with the lighting rig gets a little bit ahead of its subject, which is why the train being filmed gets dark from time to time, but you can see this rig clearly at the beginning, and towards the end, the camera train pulls close enough that you can see the staff on the lighting rig train walking about its platform.

You can clearly see the third train providing lighting at 3:10. Very interesting.

It looks like the third train is pulling some kind of open car behind it that has the lights mounted on it. At about 3:50, you can see a guy step from this rig into the back door of the train that's pulling it.

The company that filmed it started producing movies in 1895, so they probably had a handle on the film aspects by 1905:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0000524/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Mutoscope_and_Biograp...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Bitzer

I think there is only a parallel train for a portion of the trip, so I agree with the sibling that the lighting is coming from the train behind.

A good view of people on the platform starts at about 4:20.

I'm not sure if its an artifact of the camera, a result of their clothes or something cultural but its fascinating to watch them walk.

The men especially all walk differently than people today. Their posture and demeanor is almost alien. Its almost like they're all walking down an invisible incline.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090927061327AA...

I could believe that gait/pace/posture vary by culture, region, and era... as with say diction and relative prevalence of different facial expressions. Even if you removed the cues of dress and surroundings, you might be able to watch video of walkers from different cities and tell New Yorkers from others, or at least large cities vs. small towns, etc. And just seeing how much more formally dressed city dwellers once were, in public - different clothes require a different style of motion and imply a different intended presentation to others.

But, I suspect artifacts of the filming and conversion to modern formats are larger factors. Slight differences in replay speed, or cyclical variations caused by either the original machinery or compromises of framerate conversion, could also lead to the kind of 'alien-ness' we perceive.

I believe you are seeing focal plane shutter distortion.

http://maisonbisson.com/post/10531/focal-plane-shutter-disto...

Given that they did not have "video" back then (in the sense of electronically captured image data, whether digital or analog), isn't this really "footage"?

It looks pretty clean and delicately built. I wish we behaved it good.

What strikes me the most is how similar they are to us.

I envy the time when everyone is wearing a suite and a tophat with an awesome mustasche, aswell as acting like a true gentlemen.

looking at all those people, thinking how each is busy with their day, their plans, their hopes - then realizing all of them had already lived their lives and died, including the odd child also in the video... Nothing deep to say - this can be said about every old media showing people - just for some reason, perhaps the portrayed routine, this made me reflect on that fact

I've thought about that watching old movies from even as late as the '30s - that every single person I'm watching (scenes with 10s if not hundreds of people) are long dead.

Every time I watch old films or start pondering mortality I then think of life longevity augmentation which is probably going to happen in the next 40-50 years (if not sooner) and then wonder if a. I'll live that long, and b. what a shame it is all those people are dead.

Then I start thinking of all the differences we'll have when longevity comes about, such as being able to travel intergalactic distances, declining birth rates, and placing a higher price on the human life. It's an interesting thought exercise.

What about Youtube? Never in history could people so easily share their lives with the whole planet and it being archived very well (and searchable). Think about the impact it (already) has on the future, when people somewhere hundred years from now can look back at so much of human history in full color and sound etc. We as humans are currently recording so much for future generations. Half of it may be crap, but on the other side there's also a lot of good stuff.

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