Nearly seven years since the subway token was rendered essentially worthless, the former symbol of loud, sweaty, in-your-face Noo Yawk is still very much in demand, reports AMNY’s Urbanite blog.

Heather Haddon writes:

Straphangers who have held onto the iconic coins redeem thousands of them every year, and sales are on the upswing for retro token jewelry.

“It’s nostalgia, and nostalgia is everything,” said Ward Wallau, head of a California company that refashions tokens into jewelry.

Last year, straphangers turned in 27,000 tokens to NYC Transit, up 13 percent from the year before. Those who redeem the predominantly brass discs receive what they were worth when decommissioned, from 20 cents to $4 for express bus tokens.

Around 13 million tokens still exist in people’s change jars and on their shelves.

Wallau buys mounds of them from the MTA to make jewelry and collectibles out of them; his biggest seller are the $125 cuff links. His company is called Tokens & Icons.

Benjamin Kabak at Second Avenue Sagas offers some perspective on the token’s 50-year run.

Stoopid

We taught my son that stupid was a bad word. We didn’t want him calling things (“Stupid game” or “Stupid dog” or “Stupid anthill”) or people this word so we told him it was a baaaaaad word.

Then of course it happened that he tried to tell us that someone used the word only he couldn’t use the word because he knew it was a bad word so… he asked us if he could spell it and if spelling it was the same a saying the word out loud. We said yes, he could spell it and wasn’t quite the same as saying the word.

So he looked around, as if he was doing something wrong and someone would overhear him and whispered. “That boy said the Franklin was s-t-o-o-p-i-d.”

And so the parenting world goes.

Yesterday I saw the ad from Diesel at 42nd Street, Bryant Park station by the 5th Avenue entrance. It’s a series of wall advertisements with captions like this:

“Stupid might fail. Smart doesn’t even try.”

The picture that accompanied it was a man trying to fit himself into a mailbox. His head was in the top and his feet were up in the air. The tag line in the bottom right corner stated,  “Diesel for successful living.”

Here are the next four.

“Be stupid.” Maybe that one just spoke for itself.

“We’re with stupid.” The picture next to this had the infamous yellow smiley face next to it on a black background

“You can’t outsmart stupid.” This one had a woman’s face six inches away from an open mouthed white tiger.

“Smart had one idea and that idea was stupid.”

And finally…

“Stupid ain’t dumb.”

Now my son no longer spells stupid with two “o’s”. I miss those days. Especially when I see an advertisement campaign like this one.

It’s just s-t-o-o-p-i-d.

 –Joe Lunievicz 

It being that time of year when New Yorkers are nice and all, I sign off for the Christmas holidays with this bit of seasonal cheer from the New York Times’ Metropolitan Diary.

Dear Diary:

One night in late October, as I was riding a packed express subway on the 2 and 3 lines, a seat opened up. A man in his 30s went for the open seat and, in doing so, pushed aside the jacket of a younger man who was already sitting. The seated man said something like, “You have no right to touch my property.” The older man replied angrily, “This is a public place.”

An argument immediately ensued, and, after a brief silence, the older man yelled at the top of his lungs, “I’m going to punch you in the face!”

The younger man quickly got up and joined the stare-down, exchanging threats; each was waiting for the other to throw the first swing.

Just as the tension came to an apex, a petite woman, probably in her 50s, yelled even louder: “Will you two shut up!”

The entire train, including the two arguing men, stopped and looked at this little woman as she continued to fulminate: “What’s wrong with you two? You are acting like children!”

The two men actually looked ashamed. The woman then demanded that they apologize to each other; I couldn’t believe it when I saw the younger man offer his hand to the other. The older man, somewhat reluctantly, and with his head down, shook his hand.

As if that weren’t enough, the woman then insisted that the two men apologize to the entire train car.

At this, the passengers broke into applause.

Ken Charkalis

Happy holidays!

[image: cartoonstock.com]

The W and Z trains will go the way of automats and guys calling strangers “Mac” if planned transit cuts gain final approval. So will free transit rides for students.

The NY Times says the cuts are necessary after the MTA found a nearly $400 million revenue shortfall.

The cuts would eliminate two subway lines, create more crowding on subways and buses, and reduce frequency at off-peak hours. Service on dozens of bus lines would be reduced or ended, and disabled riders would find it more difficult to get around.

The plan would, in short, strip back some of the advances to New York City’s transit system in the past decade, and the formal announcement on Monday stirred a chorus of complaints from the city’s politicians and transit advocates, who pointed fingers at Albany, City Hall and the authority’s management.

The earliest the cuts would come would be June.

And file this one under Who Knew? Cranky White Male Clyde Haberman does some digging (Thanks, Wikipedia!) and finds out that Jay-Z got his nom de rap from a pair of subway lines.

Outer-borough folks are learning what Metro-North riders have long known: Fallen leaves can severely foul up your commute.

The MTA has posted signs on subway lines that go outside, reports the New York Times, warning riders to expect leaf-fueled delays.

Subway riders who thought they had come across every reason for train delays — station fires, flooded tracks and sick passengers — have been presented with a new one: falling leaves.

Transit officials have put up about 500 signs along three subway lines in recent weeks warning that fallen foliage, “crushed by moving trains,” has been leaving a “slippery residue” that “may affect the train’s ability to start and stop.” Riders of the B and Q lines, which have several open-air stops in Brooklyn, and the Franklin Avenue shuttle in Brooklyn, which is completely exposed, were told to “allow for additional travel time.”

New Yorkers are not taking the news well.

“Because of leaves?” one rider, Sylis Gordon, asked incredulously on Wednesday as she waited for the Q train at the Parkside Avenue station. “That’s new.” She looked around her, noticing garbage on the tracks, but said, “There aren’t that many leaves.”

There’s a heartbreaking Page 1 story in today’s NY Times about a 13 year old boy who, fearing a scolding at his Bensonhurst home, ran away and spent the next 11 days riding the rails. Francisco “Franky” Hernandez Jr. eluded both the police and his frantic parents until a transit officer paired the boy up with the picture on a handmade “Nino Perdido” sign at a Coney Island station Oct. 26.

Franky was diagnosed with Asperger’s, sort of a high-function autism condition, in recent years. He’d run away on the rails once before; in January, Hernandez–also in trouble at school at the time–rode the subway but returned home five hours later.

The story offers a tragic look at a mother’s efforts to connect with an Asperger’s child, who typically has extreme difficulty expressing emotion, and a school system’s apparent inability to find a productive environment for such a kid. It doesn’t make the NYPD and the city’s extensive surveillance system in the subways look so hot either.

The boy rode the D, F and 1 train and subsisted on food purchased at newsstands: chips, croissants, jelly rolls. He drank bottled water and used the bathroom at the Stillwell Avenue station.

Franky’s mother, Marisela Garcia, isn’t about to throw away the stack of Nino Perdido signs she made last month.

“It’s not easy to say it’s over and it won’t happen again,” she said.

This week’s edition of the NY Times’ “Septuagenarians Say the Darndest Things” “New York Owns the Market On Witty Passers-By” “Metropolitan Diary” shows a teeming mob about to trample a not-exactly innocent 2-year-old.

Dear Diary:

There was an unusually long line of rush-hour commuters impatiently waiting to exit the subway stop at Broadway and 79th Street. There was only one exit, since the other was under construction. People started to grumble as the line inched forward.

When the line finally snaked toward the stairs, I could see the reason for the glacial pace. A toddler, clearly new to the negotiation of steps, was gingerly stepping down toward the unhappy crowd, each step an enormous accomplishment, a huge satisfied grin on his face, while his mother — arms filled with groceries — gently guided him from behind.

Never had I seen a child so proud and so wonderfully oblivious to the simmering impatience of the barely contained mob that extended deep into the station.

Spence Halperin

[image: photographersdirect.com]

Some of us experience intense anxiety when thinking about being stuck in a locked subway car.

Add a knife-wielding maniac to that bete noir, and you’ve got a fairly miserable evening commute.

That’s what happend for 30 unfortunate straphangers on the D train Saturday after Jerry Sanchez stabbed a man in the neck with a steak knife, killing the guy.

Reports Metro:

When the train pulled into the Seventh Avenue stop at 53rd Street, the NYPD told the motorman to keep the doors locked tight so Sanchez, 37, couldn’t escape. Terrified passengers huddled on one end of the car for five minutes waiting for the cops, while Sanchez calmly sat in his seat, according to reports.

National Geographic has a special tonight on how New York subway cars are made. It’s a series called Ultimate Factories, which visits the production plant in Hornell, New York to see how the R160 cars come together.

Actually, the NY Times notes, the cars come together in France and Brazil, and are merely finished in New York.

The Times TV critic says watching the decades-old cars tossed off the Maryland coast to become marine life reefs comes with some degree of satisfaction.

Writes Neil Genzlinger:

Watching those cars going under feels like revenge, or vindication, or something, for all those appointments missed because the R and the N — the Rarely and the Never — didn’t show up, or because an indecipherable intercom failed to convey that the E train was going to skip the next 20 stops, or insert your own subway nightmare here.

It’s on Nat Geo at 8 tonight.

Let’s start charging subway riders extra fees for hauling suitcases, bicycles and refrigerators on the trains, argues Clyde Haberman.

Before we discuss this we have to establish who Clyde Haberman is and how he thinks. Clyde Haberman seems to have made a career out of scolding people on public transit who do not act exactly like him, which involves sitting with your knees clenched, reading a NY Times folded vertically into quarters, uttering nary a word, and making sure the legs of your seersucker suit don’t mistakenly creep over the line separating your seat from the seat next to it.

For a long list of Haberman’s grievances against mass transit litter, mass transit NY Times reading, and mass transit cellphone use, click on this link.

Is Clyde Haberman riding the same subway as you and me? He writes:

An underground system that was designed to transport people, and only people, looks more like a network of freight trains at times.

Some passengers board the trains carrying suitcases the size of steamer trunks. The phenomenon is especially acute on summer weekends, when many New Yorkers head for the hills or the beaches schlepping more stuff than wartime refugees.

Routinely, riders haul enormous boxes containing appliances and other goods. Several months ago, I saw a man using a dolly to wheel a refrigerator onto a train. One day last week, no fewer than 13 baby strollers filled an entire car of a No. 1 train.

I’ve got a lot of complaints about the subway, but I can’t say that people lugging heavy cargo on board is among the top 25.

Clyde Haberman says the MTA should adopt an airline-style approach to customers with large bags, seeing as the airlines do such a tremendous job of preventing people from bringing giant suitcases on board, and charging for bags has been such a public relations boon.

Subway stations could easily be equipped with metal devices similar to those that are used at airports to delineate the limits for carry-on bags. Any oversize item would lead to a surcharge.

Surely, an extra buck or so would not bankrupt anyone taking home a 52-inch plasma screen television or heading to the Hamptons for the weekend. Just as surely, the transit system is in no position to turn up its nose at any dollar falling its way.

But more important than money is the possibility that a surcharge might make some people think twice about what they bring with them into the subways. Those outsize objects slow things down. They get in the way of passengers entering and leaving trains, and they clog subway station stairwells. Inevitably, they contribute to slowdowns…

Seriously, the guy should lay off the Haterade.