On a damp October morning in 1904, thousands of New Yorkers crowded into a brand-new station under City Hall to ride a train beneath the streets for the first time. They paid five cents, stepped into clean, bright cars, and travelled at a speed that seemed almost miraculous. That first ride was more than a novelty. The history of the New York subway is the story of how a crowded, fast-growing city learned to move millions of people underground, and how that underground world shaped the New York we know today.
More than a century later, the subway still runs day and night, carrying office workers, students, tourists, nurses finishing night shifts, and musicians heading to late gigs. It is noisy, crowded, sometimes delayed, and deeply loved. To understand New York, you have to understand its subway — its builders, its rival companies, its art, its music, and its survival through crises that might have closed a lesser system for good.
The History of the New York Subway Before the First Train
Long before 1904, New Yorkers were already dreaming of travelling underground. The streets of lower Manhattan were jammed with horse-drawn carriages, carts, and pedestrians, and the new elevated railways, which began operating in the late 1860s, were noisy, dirty, and cast long shadows over the streets below. Inventors and engineers proposed tunnels, pneumatic tubes, and other schemes to move people faster and cleaner.
The most famous early experiment belonged to Alfred Ely Beach, who in 1870 opened a short pneumatic subway under Broadway. A single car, pushed by compressed air, carried passengers one block from Warren Street to Murray Street. It was a demonstration, not a real transport line, and it closed in 1873 when funding and political support ran out. Yet Beach proved something important: New Yorkers would happily go underground if the ride was smooth and the station was pleasant. His tunnel was later rediscovered during construction work, a hidden reminder of an idea ahead of its time.
By the 1890s, the city was ready to try again, this time properly. Rapid transit planning, new tunnelling methods, and electric traction made a real subway possible. The city would own the tunnels and stations, while a private company would build and run the trains under contract. That partnership model produced the first line, and it set the pattern for the system that followed.
The History of the New York Subway Begins in 1904
The Interborough Rapid Transit Company, known as the IRT, opened the first subway line on October 27, 1904. It ran from City Hall in lower Manhattan north to 145th Street, with a branch to the Bronx, covering about nine miles and serving 28 stations. The fare was five cents, and on the first day an estimated 150,000 people rode. The stations were decorated with tiles, mosaics, and plaques, because the builders believed public transport should be beautiful as well as useful.
The opening was a civic celebration. The mayor, George B. McClellan Jr., famously took the controls for part of the first run. Newspapers marvelled at the speed and smoothness of electric trains, and property values along the line began to rise. Within a few years, the subway was extended into Brooklyn and deeper into the Bronx and Queens, opening up new neighbourhoods for housing. Areas that had been farmland or scattered villages became busy residential districts, because workers could now commute quickly to Manhattan.
Two more private companies soon joined the IRT. The Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation, or BMT, built lines across Brooklyn and into Manhattan, while the city itself later built the Independent Subway System, or IND, in the 1920s and 1930s. For decades, New Yorkers navigated three separate systems with different fares, maps, and train designs, even though the lines increasingly overlapped. That rivalry explains why some stations today have confusing layouts and why older New Yorkers still talk about IRT, BMT, and IND lines as if they were different worlds.
Unification, Decline, and Survival
In 1940, the city bought out the private companies and unified the system under public control. The five-cent fare, which had held since 1904, could not last in a changing economy, and fares rose gradually over the following decades. The unified system became the largest in the world by some measures, but the decades after the Second World War were hard. Cars, suburbs, and falling investment drew riders away, and by the 1970s and 1980s the subway was struggling with graffiti-covered cars, unreliable service, and a reputation for danger.
What saved it was a long, unglamorous programme of repair, and that recovery is a central chapter in the history of the New York subway. New cars replaced ageing fleets, stations were cleaned and rebuilt, tracks and signals were renewed, and policing and maintenance improved. By the 1990s, ridership was climbing again, helped by the MetroCard, introduced in the mid-1990s, which replaced tokens and made transfers easier. The subway that many New Yorkers remember from films of the 1970s — dark, battered, and chaotic — gradually became the brighter, busier system of the 2000s.
The system also proved its resilience in crisis. After the September 11 attacks in 2001, lines through lower Manhattan were rebuilt. After Hurricane Sandy in 2012 flooded tunnels with seawater, workers pumped out stations and restored service line by line, in a recovery effort widely praised. During the pandemic years, ridership fell sharply, then recovered as the city reopened. Through each shock, the argument for the subway stayed the same: no other mode can move so many people through such a dense city.
What Makes the System Unique
- It runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, one of the few large systems in the world to do so.
- It has 472 stations, more than any other subway system in the world.
- Many lines run express and local services on parallel tracks, so a fast train can overtake a stopping train.
- Its map, first redesigned in a famous modern style in the 1970s, has become a design icon in its own right.
- Its stations hold public art, from the original tile mosaics to modern glass and mosaic installations.
The 24-hour service deserves special mention. Most cities close their metros overnight for maintenance, running replacement buses instead. New York keeps trains running through the night, although less frequently, because the city itself never fully sleeps. Night-shift nurses, bakers, cleaners, theatre workers, and early-morning market traders all depend on those late trains. The cost is real — maintenance must be squeezed into shorter windows — but New Yorkers treat all-night service as a birthright, not a luxury.
Art, Music, and Subway Culture
A subway ride in New York is also a cultural experience. Buskers play jazz, classical, and hip-hop in station passages, some of them through the official Music Under New York programme. Mosaic artwork brightens walls that would otherwise be plain concrete. The original City Hall station, closed to regular service since 1945 but still passed by the 6 train as it loops, is famous for its arches, skylights, and elegant tiles — a reminder that the first builders wanted the subway to feel like a public palace.
The subway has inspired countless songs, films, and photographs, from gritty crime dramas to romantic comedies set on late-night trains. It has also been a stage for everyday New York life: strangers sharing a carriage, readers lost in books, dancers practising between stops, and vendors selling snacks at station entrances. For visitors, learning the subway is often the moment New York stops feeling like a tourist destination and starts feeling like a place they belong.
For more American stories, readers of ENG Post may enjoy the history of the US flag and facts about the US national anthem, which, like the subway, tell a story about how American identity was built in public.
The Modern Subway: OMNY, Extensions, and the Future
The biggest recent change for riders has been payment. The MetroCard, a familiar yellow-and-blue card for a generation of New Yorkers, is being replaced by OMNY, a contactless system rolled out from 2019. Riders can tap a bank card, a phone, or an OMNY card at the turnstile, without queuing for a ticket machine. It is a small change that makes the system feel modern to visitors used to tapping in other world cities.
Expansion has been slower and more expensive than early builders could have imagined. The Second Avenue Subway, first proposed nearly a century ago, finally opened its first phase on January 1, 2017, bringing new stations to the Upper East Side. The 7 line extension to Hudson Yards opened in 2015, serving a new neighbourhood on Manhattan’s west side. Future phases, new signals, and accessible stations are planned, but they face the familiar New York challenges of cost, geology, and building under a living city without stopping it.
Accessibility remains a work in progress. Many older stations were built long before step-free access was standard, and adding lifts to deep, crowded stations is complex and costly. The transit authority has committed to making more stations accessible, station by station, while also upgrading signals to allow more frequent trains. The goal is a subway that keeps its historic character — the mosaics, the express tracks, the all-night service — while meeting modern expectations for reliability and access.
Tips for Riding the Subway Like a Local
- Check whether your train is local or express before boarding — an express can skip your stop.
- Stand to the right on escalators and let passengers off before you board.
- Use a tap payment or OMNY card rather than buying single tickets for every ride.
- Allow extra time on weekends, when maintenance work often changes routes.
- Look up at station mosaics and artwork — some of the best public art in New York is underground.
No account of the history of the New York subway would be complete without a ride itself, and the subway rewards curiosity. Take a ride on the 6 train loop to glimpse City Hall station, visit the New York Transit Museum in a decommissioned Brooklyn station, or simply ride from one end of a line to the other and watch the city change outside the windows. If you love hidden city stories, you may also enjoy our guide to secret tunnels in American cities on ENG Post.
From a five-cent ride under City Hall to a vast, all-night network of 472 stations, the history of the New York subway shows how the subway has carried New York through growth, decline, disaster, and renewal. It is imperfect, and New Yorkers will happily tell you so, but it is also irreplaceable — the thread that stitches five boroughs into one city. Next time you tap through a turnstile, remember that you are riding a piece of living history. Share this story with someone planning a New York trip, and tell us in the comments: what is your favourite subway line, station, or New York ride?